Business rule management systems in health care

Business Rule Management Systems will become the norm, for sure - a short piece in nytimes about it -

The Doctor Will B.R.M.S. You Now - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

It makes sense to have a technology that can process the interactions between decisions and provide real time alerts and decision making tools. The difference between the airline industry and the medical industry is the fuzziness around the logic and algorithms used to make decisions in medicine. Also doctors make so many decisions in a day that there is a blunted response to alerts - there's only so many "popups" that a person can take in a day - it becomes a "cry-wolf" phenomenon.

BRMS will actually work better on the admin side - looking at more macro trends in the hospital - real time mapping of nosocomial infections, surgical throughput, discharge times - the sort of operational data that is actionable on the admin side.

Though I know of companies doing innovative medical BRMS, I have to tell you that we're a long way from something that is useable/ friendly on the clinical front lines. And even if the private sector does create a robust clinical brms solution, when you dig into the economics, it will likely need a push from the government - sort of like wind turbines or hybrid engines - good technologies that make sense, but are too expensive to bring to market without federal support (both on the production side and consumer purchasing side)