Investigation into Scaling-Up the SOAP Problem-Oriented Medical Record into a Clinical Case Study

Modern clinical decision making is increasingly based on evidence-based practice. This practice provides healthcare professionals as well as patients with scientifically proven information on the various medical options that are available to them. Lawrence Weed (MD) since early 1960 provided a vision that can make clinical practice more evidence-based by linking everything at the bedside and the bench side through a problem list. Physicians need to describe their patient cases based on the SOAP note needs to be linked to the problem list as well as experts at the bench they need to link things like drugs to the problem list. According to this vision, we managed to build our QL4POMR during the last five years; however, in this article we are presenting our initial investigation into how to scale our prototype so it can enable clinicians to describe clinical cases with the ability to interrogate medical repositories for more information to arrive at a better diagnosis, prognosis or building a clinical case report. This paper investigate scaling the SOAP note into a clinical study report based on using the PICO framework to generate clinical questions related to the patient(s) case and compile a clinical report based on the outcome of the search to answer these questions.