Clinical decision-making and secondary findings in systems medicine

BACKGROUND

Systems medicine is the name for an assemblage of scientific strategies and practices that include bioinformatics approaches to human biology (especially systems biology); "big data" statistical analysis; and medical informatics tools. Whereas personalized and precision medicine involve similar analytical methods applied to genomic and medical record data, systems medicine draws on these as well as other sources of data. Given this distinction, the clinical translation of systems medicine poses a number of important ethical and epistemological challenges for researchers working to generate systems medicine knowledge and clinicians working to apply it.

DISCUSSION

This article focuses on three key challenges: First, we will discuss the conflicts in decision-making that can arise when healthcare providers committed to principles of experimental medicine or evidence-based medicine encounter individualized recommendations derived from computer algorithms. We will explore in particular whether controlled experiments, such as comparative effectiveness trials, should mediate the translation of systems medicine, or if instead individualized findings generated through "big data" approaches can be applied directly in clinical decision-making. Second, we will examine the case of the Riyadh Intensive Care Program Mortality Prediction Algorithm, pejoratively referred to as the "death computer," to demonstrate the ethical challenges that can arise when big-data-driven scoring systems are applied in clinical contexts. We argue that the uncritical use of predictive clinical algorithms, including those envisioned for systems medicine, challenge basic understandings of the doctor-patient relationship. Third, we will build on the recent discourse on secondary findings in genomics and imaging to draw attention to the important implications of secondary findings derived from the joint analysis of data from diverse sources, including data recorded by patients in an attempt to realize their "quantified self." This paper examines possible ethical challenges that are likely to be raised as systems medicine to be translated into clinical medicine. These include the epistemological challenges for clinical decision-making, the use of scoring systems optimized by big data techniques and the risk that incidental and secondary findings will significantly increase. While some ethical implications remain still hypothetical we should use the opportunity to prospectively identify challenges to avoid making foreseeable mistakes when systems medicine inevitably arrives in routine care.

[Diagnostics of pain in old age. Perspectives on a multidimensional phenomenon]

Old people's experience of pain differs markedly from that of younger people. Old people not only suffer from pain more often but also the pain is predominantly chronic in nature. In many cases older patients experience pain from more than one cause at any time due to multimorbidity. Against this backdrop this article examines the question of how diagnostic procedures of pain have to be specific for older patients and how these requirements are currently met in clinical practice. Diagnostic procedures in older persons need to be rooted in a biopsychosocial understanding of pain that also takes into account that the pain experience is always made up of several pain dimensions. A comprehensive understanding of pain communication also has to be taken into account as well as age-specific influences. In older persons pain assessment needs to encompass motivational affective, sensory discriminative and cognitive evaluative aspects. If pain assessment is limited to pain severity or the observation of pain behavior only, important information is lacking and important biographical, health-related, phenomenological and care-specific information cannot be used for the benefit of the patient. Different dimensions of pain cannot be used variably but need to be regarded as complementing elements; however, this approach is currently not always possible to follow through in clinical practice especially with age-related illnesses, such as dementia. Currently, only the geriatric pain interview (Geriatrisches Schmerzinterview) is available as a multidimensional tool for the assessment of pain in older people. There is a clear need for more and extended research and development of tools and processes to comprehensively assess pain in older persons.