A mobile decision support system for red eye diseases diagnosis: experience with medical students

Abstract

A good primary health care is the base for a better healthcare system. Taking a good decision on time by the primary health care physician could have a huge repercussion. In order to ease the diagnosis task arise the Decision Support Systems (DSS), which offer counselling instead of refresh the medical knowledge, in a profession where it is still learning every day. The implementation of these systems in diseases which are a frequent cause of visit to the doctor like ophthalmologic pathologies are, which affect directly to our quality of life, takes more importance. This paper aims to develop OphthalDSS, a totally new mobile DSS for red eye diseases diagnosis. The main utilities that OphthalDSS offers will be a study guide for medical students and a clinical decision support system for primary care professionals. Other important goal of this paper is to show the user experience results after OphthalDSS being used by medical students of the University of Valladolid. For achieving the main purpose of this research work, a decision algorithm will be developed and implemented by an Android mobile application. Moreover, the Quality of Experience (QoE) has been evaluated by the students through the questions of a short inquiry. The app developed which implements the algorithm OphthalDSS is capable of diagnose more than 30 eye's anterior segment diseases. A total of 67 medical students have evaluated the QoE. The students find the diseases' information presented very valuable, the appearance is adequate, it is always available and they have ever found what they were looking for. Furthermore, the students think that their quality of life has not been improved using the app and they can do the same without using the OphthalDSS app. OphthalDSS is easy to use, which is capable of diagnose more than 30 ocular diseases in addition to be used as a DSS tool as an educational tool at the same time.

Keywords: Decision Support System (DSS); Eye’s anterior segment; Ophthalmology; mHealth.