TY - JOUR T1 - Decision support for diagnosis should become routine in 21st century primary care JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 494 LP - 495 DO - 10.3399/bjgp17X693185 VL - 67 IS - 664 AU - Brendan C Delaney AU - Olga Kostopoulou Y1 - 2017/11/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/67/664/494.abstract N2 - One of the primary tasks of the GP is the diagnosis of patients presenting with new symptoms. This is the bedrock on which patient care is founded, particularly in health systems such as the UK NHS, where the GP acts as a ‘gatekeeper’ to specialist services. Diagnostic error has been defined as ‘a missed opportunity to make a timely or correct diagnosis based on the available evidence’ .1 Over half of litigation claims against GPs are for failure to diagnose. Significant delays have been reported in the diagnosis of common cancers and in conditions such as coeliac disease.2 Increasing use of standard pathways of care to improve speed of diagnosis, particularly in cancer, means that making a correct initial assessment of the patient is even more important.3 When we factor in the increasing demands on GPs’ time and workload due to, for example, increasing multimorbidity in older patients, and the multitude of common ‘alternative’ explanations for symptoms,4 it is clear that we need as much support as possible from technology to provide good-quality and safe patient care.5The world outside health care has changed dramatically over the past decade with the development of complex interconnected data systems, large volumes of data, and methods to produce knowledge from those data, known as the ‘Big Data revolution’. Data-mining methods based on Bayesian networks and alternative inference processes such as deep data mining are a common part of marketing, social media, … ER -