Clinical Decision Support (CDSS) attempts to assist doctors in making the best judgments possible. It is challenging to pinpoint the ideal result because every patient has different traits and preferences. However, to ensure that sacrifices are made in a way that fits a particular patient, physicians should maintain their autonomy to make the correct diagnosis. This conceptual analysis essay presents a rationale for whether clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) and physicians’ lack of autonomy should be presumed right or wrong.
It is right for physicians to use clinical decision support systems and lack physician autonomy for the following reasons. First, clinicians use CDSSs to assist them in making choices regarding a patient’s treatment. Several regular duties are taken over by CDSS tools and systems, alerting the clinical team to issues that may arise or providing recommendations for the team and the patient to consider lower costs (Lamanna & Byrne, 2018). Unlike physician autonomy, CDSS offers timely information, typically at the point of care, with the potential to significantly enhance patient outcomes and result in higher-quality medical treatment.
In turn, the physician’s lack of autonomy must be regarded as a serious issue that may entail major consequences for the patient. Specifically, the absence of autonomy over the course of actions that a physician may undertake in order to adders a patient’s needs, particularly, the immediate ones, may lead to the further aggravation of the patient’s condition. The problem may be exacerbated by the lack of proper health awareness in the patient and the subsequent refusal to be educated concerning the relevant health concerns (Lamanna & Byrne, 2018). Consequently, the choices made by patients who lack awareness and health literacy may entail dire consequences for their well-being and even life. The specified outcome conflicts directly with some of the central concepts of healthcare ethics (Lamanna & Byrne, 2018). Specifically, a breach of two of the foundational healthcare ethics concepts, namely, beneficence and nonmaleficence, is observed, which opens the door to multiple concerns (Lamanna & Byrne, 2018). Namely, by failing to exert proper autonomy, a physician may fail to ensure that the proposed course of actions meets the patient’s best interests as the concept of beneficence requires (Lamanna & Byrne, 2018). Likewise, the outcome of the specified scenario ay misalign with the notion of nonmaleficence since the lack of physician’s autonomy may lead to inflicting significant harm on the patient.
Consequently, among professionals, biased judgment and decision-making are present. According to Lamanna & Byrne (2018), the term bias is used in the psychology of human judgment and decision-making to describe a judgment that does not agree with the facts or a decision that is not optimum from a practical perspective, which seeks to maximize the predicted outcome in quantitative terms. Several pieces of evidence suggest that these biases influence how doctors diagnose and treat patients. Time constraints, complicated and dispersed medical information and the allocation of care throughout a team of caregivers are all factors that may lead to mistakes and biases in decision-making in the field of critical care. To avoid biasness, CDSS provides precise and practical recommendations based on data analytics, which helps optimize the expected outcome.
Reference
Lamanna, C., & Byrne, L. (2018). Should artificial intelligence augment medical decision making? The case for an autonomy algorithm. AMA Journal of Ethics, 20(9), 902-910.