Design of an expert system for monitoring drug treatment in a psychiatric hospital

The development of a prototype system and the incorporation of a language/action model to facilitate human/computer interaction in the development of an expert system that would operate in real time and be used directly by clinicians treating psychiatric patients is described. The prototype system was implemented initially in Prolog and run on a SUN 3/50 workstation. This system was able to monitor the drug treatment of patients with any of three diagnoses: bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and major depression. The prototype was tested on subsets of patient-related data representing approximately 1200 patient-days of actual patient, laboratory, and pharmacy records, which were downloaded from the hospital's database. It was found that 100% of the clinical events of potential concern were properly identified. The language/action perspective has important implications for clinicians as end-users and the problem of acceptability of expert systems in the clinical setting.<<ETX>>