This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

James E. Levin, PhD
University of Chicago

JAMA. 1987;258(17):2375.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

In his excellent review of the current progress in computerized medical expert systems, Dr shortliffe¹ neglects an important "human factor issue": familiarity. No matter how sophisticated, tools can only become useful when we learn their strengths and weaknesses and discover how they work in a number of different situations. For this reason, a program such as DXplain² may never find wide acceptance. Because it is intended to help the physician only with particularly difficult diagnoses, it is unlikely that he or she will ever gain enough experience to be able to use it with confidence. Although desirable, the ability of the program to review its "reasoning" may not necessarily substitute for experience gained with the program under a variety of circumstances.

It is unfortunate that, in his editorial in the same issue of JAMA, Mr Harris³ chose to reinforce the fear that physicians may . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?