Medical plan-analysis by computer.

The traditional approach to computer-assisted medical decision-making involves designing a computer system which simulates a physician's decision-making process. This paper describes a different approach: Medical Plan-Analysis (MPA). Instead of trying to tell a physician how best to manage a patient, an MPA system critiques a physician's management plan. It is anticipated that this approach may have a number of potential social, medical, and medicolegal advantages. The MPA approach has been implemented in ATTENDING, a system designed using Artificial Intelligence techniques to critique a physician's plan for anesthetic management.