Abstract:

Doctors often face a complex set of inputs (age, bmi, blood pressure, blood test results, symptoms, etc.) when making diagnosis and treatment decisions. In order to simplify decision making, clinical guidelines are ubiquitous and provide evidence-based rules of thumb for doctors to follow. In this paper, we use a dataset of blood test results for millions of patients to see how rigidly doctors adhere to medical guidelines for a variety of decisions. We discuss the implications for these results including how to create optimal guidelines and potential decision aides for doctors and patients.