Future of Medicine — how sharing case reports could support your clinical decision
Medical and clinical case reports are essential for recording rare cases of illness, disability, and injury. Each report does not only deliver details of a given case, but also include a brief background and further establishes the importance of the case in the medical literature. Therefore, case reports are a major contribution to the development of existing medical knowledge. Medical case reports are published in journals tailored to each specialty (such as oncology, gastrointestinal disease, cardiovascular disease, and neurological disorders), and some journals even specialize in the publication of case reports.
From a slightly different perspective, a clinical case is the most effective form of knowledge representation to present, communicate, and share medical knowledge for collaborative care and education for the doctors. But to truly render every aspect of the diagnosis efficient, it is crucial that clinical cases are digitalized. With the digitalization of clinical cases, a virtual platform could play a central role in utilizing these cases to provide analytics in diverse settings such as clinical decision support, the spread of new medical technology, and problem-based learning. Through presentation of the individual clinical case that enables healthcare professionals to analyze and augment additional information, and utilization and sharing of developed cases both inside and outside the hospital, our clinical diagnosis and treatment would no longer be detained. The digitalized service also promotes the transformation of the medical entities into a learning health system in which knowledge generation processes are embedded in daily practice to produce continual improvements in care.
The future of medicine looks bright with the advent of novel service and technology. As the German physician Samuel Hahnemann once said, “medicine is a science of experience, its object is to eradicate diseases by means of remedies. The knowledge of disease, the knowledge of remedies and the knowledge of their employment, constitute medicine”. Knowledge is power and is multiplied by sharing not saving. For the medical community to continuously improve the quality of healthcare as a collective entity, it is of utmost importance to communicate their know-hows on tackling various clinical challenges. Interchanging medical cases among doctors will be the most important step towards reducing uncertainty in their daily diagnosis, treatment, and prescription. The rise of case sharing will ultimately bring many more smiles on the suffering humanity :)
