My main interest to improve the quality of decision making in healthcare. This entails different things, some of them are:
- Help physicians acquire knowledge about what diagnostic tests and treatments that work and which ones don’t, and include that knowledge into decision making.
- Help patient and physicians communicate better, so patients as well can know what works and what doesn’t and incorporate that knowledge into their decision making process. A decision that made by a patient should be the final resultant of the best scientific evidence with their values and preferences.
- Help policy makers (public and private) know what works too and incorporate this into their decision making process.
This has several consequences. First, we must investigate what things work and teach health professionals how to properly assess the medical literature. That is why since 2002 I have been working at the Evidence-Based Medicine Unit at the School of Medicine, P. Universidad Católica de Chile Chile. Second, we must assist in the delivery of appropriate information to patients, healthcare professionals and policy makers. Third, we must evaluate whether things are done properly. For the second and third requirement we need Information Technology. That is the focus of my current research and that is why I am studying a PhD in Biomedical Informatics.
My dissertation focuses on how to improve the secondary use of clinical databases. When someone goes to a hospital or clinic that uses electronic medical records, patient information is stored in a database to document the encounter and access it in the future. The primary use of this information is the patient’s medical care. The idea behind this research topic is using that valuable information for other things too, this is called secondary use of the same information. Examples are: helping public health authorities know in advance when will an outbreak of any emerging infection occur, as occurred in 2009 with H1N1 (Epidemiological Surveillance). Another example is to identify individuals carrying a rare and incurable disease and offer them to participate in a study about a new treatment (selection of patients for clinical trials). Basically it is recognizing that we have a great source of information and we must exploit it to benefit people. All this must be done with utmost care so as not to affect patient’s privacy.