Medical Expert Systems - A Study of Trust and Acceptance by Healthcare Stakeholders

The increasing prevalence of complex technology in the form of medical expert systems in the healthcare sector is presenting challenging opportunities to clinicians in their quest to improve patients’ health outcomes. Medical expert systems have brought measurable improvements to the healthcare outcomes for some patients. This paper highlights the importance of trust and acceptance in the healthcare industry amongst receivers of the care as well as other stakeholders and between large healthcare organizations. Studies show that current conceptual trust models, which are being used to measure the degree of trust relationships in different healthcare settings, cannot be easily evaluated because of the resistance of organizational and social changes which are to be implemented. Research findings also suggest that the use of medical expert systems do not automatically guarantee improved patient healthcare outcomes. Furthermore, during the building of predictive and diagnostic expert medical systems, studies recommend the use of algorithms which can deal with noisy and imprecise data which is typical in healthcare data. Such algorithms include fuzzy rule based systems.