Self-learning EHR systems
Q: Isn't it a great idea to let the electronic healthcare record (EHR) learn from the data it holds and issue recommendations to doctors on how to diagnose and treat future patients from the history of other patients?
A: No, it's a very bad idea and for two reasons. The first reason is that the medical record does not contain any information that does not support hypotheses made by the doctors writing the notes, making the data very skewed. The second reason is that basing your knowledge and future actions on past history of a non-randomized and non-controlled group of patients is the very definition of experience based medicine, which we know with absolute certainty leads to bad methods and inferior knowledge. See my discussion of experience based vs. evidence based medicine for details.
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