An interesting but also discomforting thought that came up last during a discussion regarding Biomedical Informatics: Our very computational idea of evidence based medicine is with its maybe ten years of of presence still a fairly new concept to the field. For decades, the procedures applied to patients were largely based on experience, intuition and a somewhat vague and very encapsulated “it worked quite well last time”-approach rather than on globally proven facts.

We only just started to imagine and implement systems for collecting health care information and delivering it back to health care professionals in forms that empower them to optimal decision making. Keeping in mind how young this concept of Health Information Exchange is, we can only assume that there is certainly still room for massive improvement.