The use of an explanation algorithm in a clinical event monitor.

Clinical event monitors (CEMs) seek to improve patient care and reduce its cost by prompting clinicians to take actions that have these effects. To persuade clinicians to act, CEMs have used prewritten-text explanations. However, we encountered limitations of prewritten-text explanations in our CEM. Therefore, we decided to implement an advanced method for explanation (Suermondt's method for belief-network explanation). This method is promising, but whether it is generally applicable to all of clinical event monitoring and whether it is as efficacious as prewritten-text explanations remain areas for future research.