A comprehensive solution for psychological treatment and therapeutic path planning based on knowledge base and expertise sharing

The healthcare systems are nowadays going trough a broad standardization process so that the caregivers are guided in making decisions regarding the diagnosis and the therapeutic plannning. Differently from other fields of medicine, psychology does not base its protocol on drugs and prescription, and neither on standard surgical procedures. In this work we present a software solution to support psychologists during their decision making process, helping them both during the diagnosis and the treatment of psychological patients. The developed software is structured as a twofold application: it returns a set of clinical decision rule starting from the definitions contained on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, but joining the approach with a consensus-based clinical practice oriented approach. The first is realized by applying knowledge base to the research of well structured standard practices, while the second is obtained by means of expertise sharing from a network of psychologists. This latter characteristic not only allows us to share experiences and tips among expert operators, but also to integrate a scoring and evaluation system for to guide the choice of the user among comparable practices. The prototype has been tested and highly appreciated with an overall 96% of good evaluations. We believe that such a support could build the basis of an entire set of support software tools for medical and psychological diagnosis and treatment.