I have been researching on this subject for the past few months. It is becoming clear that to control errors in diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions, Evidence Based Medicine can be defined as "the conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of the individual patient. It means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research." (Sackett D, 1996).

This requires research and processing of clinical information that can be leveraged by a Doctor. While search from Google, Oracle and others are supporting the search portions, Clinical data is heavily semi-structured - a combination of structured and unstructured data. The unstructured portions is where you have all the content and context of diagnosis, treatments, prognosis, conclusions etc. This is where Textual ETL and the unstructured database build will help us. The entire DW2.0 methodology can be directly applied to this system. We can classify, categorize, contextualize and capture information from the clinical data into a database.

In conducting the research, I have found that we can process years of clinical data into an unstructured database with relative ease and when combined with the statistical research data, the results have been an eye-opener. The possibilities of reducing errors and offering the right treatment means the cost of healthcare can be managed well. The quality of the treatment will be more rewarding and welcome.

I know that many Doctors and other medical professionals have different opinions on this subject, but that was when no technology was available to support EBM, now that we do, we should start paying attention to this area.

I will be writing my first article for this year on this subject, stay tuned for the article.