BACKGROUND
Finding information about complex medical cases is challenging for clinicians. Due to rapidly growing of medical information in the current era and busy schedule of physicians, educating them to retrieve their required information and also summarizing patients' history could be effective to enhance medical decision making.
OBJECTIVE
This study sought to provide a protocol for searching complex medical cases.
METHODS
In existing models of grand rounds, physicians are overwhelmed with a large number of patients’ clinical data which makes it difficult to reach a clinical decision. We conducted an interdisciplinary action research embedding a clinical informationist in gastroenterology grand round to address this issue using comprehensive search strategies and summarizing patients’ information through concept mapping.
RESULTS
Other than creating diseases concept map, our proposed protocol classifies into three categories: 1) The general search strategy, 2) The protocol for searching for evidence about rare diseases, and 3) Identifying other resources more than routine medical databases.
CONCLUSIONS
Our approach represents a novel method beyond previous studies which were focused on usual ward rounds. The protocol derived from this study facilitates evidence-based decision-making by providing a comprehensive capsulate view of a complex medical case.