Can It Be Done?

A colleague and I are starting a business related to bringing clinical answers to the bedside faster and easier. We are creating a robust, community driven database that, in time, contain evidence synthesis papers from all diseases and more!

I am posting this blog to ask if the following can be done.

If our company, or any company for that matter, could index enough evidence based practice synthesis papers would it be possible to combine specific data sets to create a picture of a complex patient?

Now that is slightly confusing so let me give a little background. While schmoozing on Twitter i asked what the problems were with services like Up To Date and Epocrates. Several uses spoke about how UTD was great for textbook cases but was difficult to use for complexly ill ones. Epocrates was said to be too slow and not enough detail for some users.

So, if UTD is textbook and a limited number of patients are textbook are we really treating patients as individuals and in the best way?

Of course this is a tough question to answer, but there has to be a better way. If it was possible to index EBP data by population, co-morbidity, treatment, & outcome, would it be possible to cross-connect data to create a clinical picture of an individual patient? I think back to this TED Talk here. When watching this, substitute the pictures with data about patients. Imagine if we could link the data together to create virtual data pictures of complexly ill patient.

No longer would we be treating patients diseases individually, but rather, the best treatments for the whole patient would be discovered and interconnected. The ICU patient with multiple system diseases could have a clinical picture just for them, specified down to the age, co-morbidity's, and outcomes desired. It moves beyond the linear medical model and begins to cross into a holistic approach to care. With enough data, and the addition of genomics, individualized treatment patterns based on gene data as well as clinical diagnosis would be available creating personalized treatment plans for all the individuals on earth.

This idea is VERY exciting for me and if you are interested in helping, or learning more about EBPico LLC please let me know.

But we must remember the initial question. Is a quest like this possible... please twitter me (@nursedan, email me dan(at)simovativesolutions.com, or comment with your thoughts.