Initiative on Medical Decision-Making of the Biomedical Engineering Group (Comac-Bme) of the European Community

Abstract

Decision-making in medicine is carried out in uncertainty, and doctors can almost never be sure that they are right in their interpretation of the clinical evidence in a given patient. Their inter-observer error rate is high, often in excess of 20% [1]. They tend to try to compensate for this by seeking a redundancy of evidence, clinical and technological. This is a reasonable strategy when the evidence is cheap: it becomes unacceptable when the redundancy takes up resources which would be better used in other ways. The application of objective methods and adoption of a systems approach can reduce the uncertainty in many clinical situations. It can result in measurably increased satisfaction for patient, doctor and funding agency. These interactions between medical decision-making and biomedical engineering make it of interest to the European Community (EC).