Costs, definitive diagnosis

Definitive diagnosis comes at a cost. QA/QC expenses, regulatory expenses, and patent royalty expenses are high, as are supply costs for consumables, reagents, and test kits. Morever, the equipment required for assay and result delivery and accuracy can be expensive. In the sections that follow, an outline of how these costs are calculated is provided and an effort is made to flesh out a difficult area to quantify. Generally, test costs, neglecting administration and overhead, can be... 

Managed healthcare systems also have interests in reductionist definitions of disease. The payment and reimbursement structures of Health Management Organizations (HMOs) require that conditions be identified and coded in terms of a predefined list of syndromes with pre-established measures of cost and risk. Calling for evidence-based medicine , HMOs are more likely to reimburse conditions that are defined as biological because diagnosis appears objective. 

A diagnosis should be rational (= in terms of intellect), that is to say logical and targeted. At the same time, however, the way it is arrived at must be efficient and economical (= expedient), i.e. financially viable (cost effective for the health service) as well as acceptable in terms of the strain it puts on the patient. For this reason, economical and efficient diagnostics is by definition rational. 

So here is an attempt at a definition. Clinical decision intelligence is the application of IT to help gather, understand, and act on all available data in clinical practice, healthcare management and administration, and medical research, and where appropriate the automatic utilization of data to control certain clinical and research processes. Its aims are to encourage best practices to improve the quality of patient care by enhancing speed and efficiency to reduce safety risks and needless costs in clinical treatment, diagnosis, management, and administration to monitor and log interactions for accountability, culpability, liability and repudiation and to facilitate biomedical research and pharmaceutical development where based on inclusion of clinical and related data. 

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