scholarly journals Chatbot breakthrough in the 2020s? An ethical reflection on the trend of automated consultations in health care

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaana Parviainen ◽  
Juho Rantala
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Professional Ethics ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Epistemic Probability ◽  
Ethical Challenges ◽  
Clinical Practices ◽  
Proactive Approach ◽  
Client Relationships ◽  
Conversational Interface ◽  
Task Oriented

AbstractMany experts have emphasised that chatbots are not sufficiently mature to be able to technically diagnose patient conditions or replace the judgements of health professionals. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has significantly increased the utilisation of health-oriented chatbots, for instance, as a conversational interface to answer questions, recommend care options, check symptoms and complete tasks such as booking appointments. In this paper, we take a proactive approach and consider how the emergence of task-oriented chatbots as partially automated consulting systems can influence clinical practices and expert–client relationships. We suggest the need for new approaches in professional ethics as the large-scale deployment of artificial intelligence may revolutionise professional decision-making and client–expert interaction in healthcare organisations. We argue that the implementation of chatbots amplifies the project of rationality and automation in clinical practice and alters traditional decision-making practices based on epistemic probability and prudence. This article contributes to the discussion on the ethical challenges posed by chatbots from the perspective of healthcare professional ethics.

scholarly journals Framework for advanced supply chain planning: Large-scale petrochemical companies

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 452-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan J. Louw ◽  
Wessel Pienaar
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Supply Chain ◽  
Supply Chains ◽  
Customer Service ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Supply Chain Planning ◽  
Proactive Approach ◽  
Logistics Networks ◽  
Advanced Planning ◽  
Decision Making Processes

Most petrochemical companies are undergoing radical changes. The markets being served have expanded globally, customer service expectations have increased, and demand has become much more volatile and hence less predictable. The resulting product supply chains evolve/develop over time, with integrating decision-making processes and advanced planning practices becoming more prominent. A proactive approach with longer time horizons becomes the norm for excellence. Refinery expansion and highly integrated/sophisticated manufacturing technology have also contributed to increased interdependency within and between supply chains (upstream to feed sources, downstream to end consumer, and between logistics networks). These developments resulted in what is termed advance supply chain planning. Notwithstanding its unique differences, the petrochemical industry still has a lot of ground to cover before it can reach some of the advance supply chain planning benefits reported in other industries. This article presents what is believed to be an appropriate supply chain planning approach/framework for decision making in large-scale, integrated petrochemical companies.

scholarly journals Prediction of the Rehabilitation Duration and Risk Management for Mild-Moderate COVID-19

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (5) ◽  
pp. 652-657 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qiong-Na Zheng ◽  
Mei-Yan Xu ◽  
Yong-Le Zheng ◽  
Xiu-Ying Wang ◽  
Hui Zhao
Keyword(s):  
Risk Factors ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Risk Management ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Clinical Decision Making ◽  
Risk Model ◽  
Linear Regression Analysis ◽  
Significant Risk ◽  
Clinical Decision ◽  
Clinical Practices

ABSTRACTObjectives:More than 80% of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases are mild or moderate. In this study, a risk model was developed for predicting rehabilitation duration (the time from hospital admission to discharge) of the mild-moderate COVID-19 cases and was used to conduct refined risk management for different risk populations.Methods:A total of 90 consecutive patients with mild-moderate COVID-19 were enrolled. Large-scale datasets were extracted from clinical practices. Through the multivariable linear regression analysis, the model was based on significant risk factors and was developed for predicting the rehabilitation duration of mild-moderate cases of COVID-19. To assess the local epidemic situation, risk management was conducted by weighing the risk of populations at different risk.Results:Ten risk factors from 44 high-dimensional clinical datasets were significantly correlated to rehabilitation duration (P < 0.05). Among these factors, 5 risk predictors were incorporated into a risk model. Individual rehabilitation durations were effectively calculated. Weighing the local epidemic situation, threshold probability was classified for low risk, intermediate risk, and high risk. Using this classification, risk management was based on a treatment flowchart tailored for clinical decision-making.Conclusions:The proposed novel model is a useful tool for individualized risk management of mild-moderate COVID-19 cases, and it may readily facilitate dynamic clinical decision-making for different risk populations.

scholarly journals Towards Scalable Multi-Domain Conversational Agents: The Schema-Guided Dialogue Dataset

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (05) ◽  
pp. 8689-8696
Author(s):  
Abhinav Rastogi ◽  
Xiaoxue Zang ◽  
Srinivas Sunkara ◽  
Raghav Gupta ◽  
Pranav Khaitan
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Conversational Agents ◽  
Dialogue System ◽  
Conversational Interface ◽  
State Tracking ◽  
Public Datasets ◽  
Multiple Domains ◽  
Task Oriented ◽  
Slot Filling

Virtual assistants such as Google Assistant, Alexa and Siri provide a conversational interface to a large number of services and APIs spanning multiple domains. Such systems need to support an ever-increasing number of services with possibly overlapping functionality. Furthermore, some of these services have little to no training data available. Existing public datasets for task-oriented dialogue do not sufficiently capture these challenges since they cover few domains and assume a single static ontology per domain. In this work, we introduce the the Schema-Guided Dialogue (SGD) dataset, containing over 16k multi-domain conversations spanning 16 domains. Our dataset exceeds the existing task-oriented dialogue corpora in scale, while also highlighting the challenges associated with building large-scale virtual assistants. It provides a challenging testbed for a number of tasks including language understanding, slot filling, dialogue state tracking and response generation. Along the same lines, we present a schema-guided paradigm for task-oriented dialogue, in which predictions are made over a dynamic set of intents and slots, provided as input, using their natural language descriptions. This allows a single dialogue system to easily support a large number of services and facilitates simple integration of new services without requiring additional training data. Building upon the proposed paradigm, we release a model for dialogue state tracking capable of zero-shot generalization to new APIs, while remaining competitive in the regular setting.

Awareness and Decision Making in Professional Ethics

2000 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronny Swain
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Professional Ethics ◽  
Ethical Decision Making ◽  
Code Of Ethics ◽  
Professional Autonomy ◽  
Ethical Awareness ◽  
Ethical Decisions ◽  
The Right ◽  
Aid Decision

The paper describes the development of the 1998 revision of the Psychological Society of Ireland's Code of Professional Ethics. The Code incorporates the European Meta-Code of Ethics and an ethical decision-making procedure borrowed from the Canadian Psychological Association. An example using the procedure is presented. To aid decision making, a classification of different kinds of stakeholder (i.e., interested party) affected by ethical decisions is offered. The author contends (1) that psychologists should assert the right, which is an important aspect of professional autonomy, to make discretionary judgments, (2) that to be justified in doing so they need to educate themselves in sound and deliberative judgment, and (3) that the process is facilitated by a code such as the Irish one, which emphasizes ethical awareness and decision making. The need for awareness and judgment is underlined by the variability in the ethical codes of different organizations and different European states: in such a context, codes should be used as broad yardsticks, rather than precise templates.

Rational and interactional decision-making roles in task-oriented groups

1967 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norman F. Washburne ◽  
Cecil F. Darmofall
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Task Oriented

Communicative Transformation of Professional Values of Modern Scientific Communities

Communicology ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 15-24
Author(s):  
A.S. Proskurina
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Professional Ethics ◽  
Scientific Work ◽  
Professional Values ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Practical Implementation ◽  
Scientific Communities ◽  
Neoliberal Reforms ◽  
Communication Practices ◽  
The Relationship

Today ethics is embodied not only in day-to-day life, but also in the communication that surrounds it. The study of communication in professional communities makes it possible to determine the relationship between declared and practically embodied values in work. Ethical attitudes are not only postulates embedded in ethical codes, but also principles of interaction embodied in the construction of the information space and decision-making. Features of modern communications influence the way professional ethics is structured, which, in turn, affects its content and practical implementation. The communication through the Internet makes scientific work performative, filling it with symbols and labels. Increasingly, communication practices have to be carried out around indicators, and thus communication becomes a conductor of neoliberal reforms in scientific work. Therefore, the consequence of modern forms of communication is the forced utilitarianism of ethics associated with the need to compete in the “scientific market”. The article suggests possible ways to overcome the contradictions of communicative transformations of professional values.

Applications of blockchain in healthcare (Preprint)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pranav C
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Review Paper ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Personal Identification ◽  
Healthcare Industry ◽  
Healthcare Organizations ◽  
Paper Briefly ◽  
Blockchain Technology ◽  
Audit Trails

UNSTRUCTURED The word blockchain elicits thoughts of cryptocurrency much of the time, which does disservice to this disruptive new technology. Agreed, bitcoin launched in 2011 was the first large scale implementation of blockchain technology. Also, Bitcoin’s success has triggered the establishment of nearly 1000 new cryptocurrencies. This again lead to the delusion that the only application of blockchain technology is for the creation of cryptocurrency. However, the blockchain technology is capable of a lot more than just cryptocurrency creation and may support such things as transactions that require personal identification, peer review, elections and other types of democratic decision-making and audit trails. Blockchain exists with real world implementations beyond cryptocurrencies and these solutions deliver powerful benefits to healthcare organizations, bankers, retailers and consumers among others. One of the areas where blockchain technology can be used effectively is healthcare industry. Proper application of this technology in healthcare will not only save billions of money but also will contribute to the growth in research. This review paper briefly defines blockchain and deals in detail the applications of blockchain in various areas particularly in healthcare industry.

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