Toward a Value-Based Therapy Recommendation Model

Patient value is an important factor in clinical decision making, but conventionally, it is not incorporated in the decision processes. Clinical decision making has some clinical guidelines as a reference. There are very few value-based clinical guidelines, but knowledge about how values affect decision making is mentioned in some scattered studies in the literature. We use a literature review method to extract evidence and integrate it as part of the decision-making model. In this paper, a value-based therapy recommendation comprehensive model is proposed. A literature analysis is conducted to collect value-based evidence. The patients’ values are defined and classified with fine granularity. Categorized values and candidate therapies are used in combination as filtering keywords to build this literature database. The literature analysis method generates a literature database used as a source of arguments for influencing decision making based on values. Then, a formalism model is put forward to integrate the value-based evidence with clinical evidence, and the literature databases and clinical guidelines are collected and analyzed to populate the evidence repository. During the decision-making processes, the evidence repository is utilized to match patients’ clinical information and values. Decision-makers can dynamically adjust the relative importance of the two pieces of evidence to obtain a treatment plan that is more suitable for the patient. A prototype system was implemented using a case study for breast cancer and validated for feasibility and effectiveness through controlled experiments.