An excellent example of decision support

Regular readers of this blog know that I'm a big fan of clinical decision support, which can improve diagnosis, reduce adverse events, and improve physician efficiency. One of my favorites is neurology decision support company SimulConsult, which provides a free service that...

...allows doctors and other medical professionals to combine clinical and laboratory findings and get a "simultaneous consult" about diagnosis. Information about diseases from a large peer-reviewed community of experts is combined to suggest diagnoses and identify other findings that will be most useful in reaching a diagnosis.

The CEO, pediatric neurologist Michael Segal, MD, PhD sent me a note today announcing the launch of an innovative cases blog, which links news articles about neurological syndromes directly to SimulConsult's software.

The style is the same as used in regular blogs ("web logs") that comment on general news. Our blog extends this model by hyperlinking findings in the discussion so people can click into the SimulConsult Neurological Syndromes diagnostic software with the patient's findings already entered. As in regular blogs there is provision for feedback from readers, but here the feedback is assembled in a very sophisticated way: the differential diagnosis will change over time as people mull over the case and submit new information to the database about findings in the relevant diseases.