Optimal use of communication channels in clinical event monitoring.

We argue that the optimal use of communication channels in clinical event monitors is an important design consideration for these systems. We review the state-of-the-art in selection of communication channels, including our current approach--allowing users to choose the communication channel by which the event monitor sends each notification. We describe a new approach that we are in the process of developing. In this new approach, we view event monitoring as the decision of whether and how to send new patient data to a clinician and apply the principle of maximum expected utility to this decision problem. Our initial experience with this approach suggests that notifying clinicians of normal patient data may be of high utility. We also found that methods for explanation in uncertain reasoning may be necessary in this approach.