ABSTRACT

Medical decision making is sufficiently difficult by itself, but is even more complex given the added pressures of environment. In addition, the medical field is growing rapidly, with new research yielding different and better ways to evaluate and treat patients. The attempt at building a large-scale critiquing system for the medical community was made by Miller. Critiquing systems were originally explored as a decision aiding strategy by Perry Miller. Critiquing systems are potentially more cooperative and informative to practitioners than are diagnosis systems because they structure their analysis and feedback around the proposed solution generated by the user. Because there are many ways to solve a problem, particularly in the medical field where variation in practice is quite common, the system will use the person's initial solution or partial solution as a basis for communication. In active critiquing systems, feedback may be given during the problem-solving process or held off until the user has finished.