Abstract
Decision Support Systems (DSSs) are tools that are designed to assist in one or more stages of the decision-making process. DSSs aim to improve decision outcomes by sharing the onus of information processing with the decision-maker. Some DSSs provide full-task automation, whilst other DSSs are designed to provide the user with the necessary cognitive scaffolding to enhance the processing of domain-related information; thereby facilitating task performance. Clinical diagnosis is one context in which DSSs could be used to facilitate decision-making processes. Research has shown diagnostic error in medicine to be approximately 15%. No reliable data exists on diagnostic error rates in psychiatric medicine, however clinical researchers speculate that psychiatric disorders are more prone to error than non-psychiatric illness. The current study investigated the comparative effects of a tablet-based reduced processing DSS (“DSS application”) on the clinical reasoning processes and decision-making outcomes of a naïve population in the domain of neurodevelopmental disorders. The participants of the study consisted of 78 undergraduate psychology students who observed and diagnosed at least one of two three-year old boys presenting with Autism Spectrum Disorder from a 20-minute observation video. To select the correct diagnosis from a list of 12 alternatives, participants had to extrapolate the correct informational cues from the observation. There were three experimental groups; each group received a different diagnostic-aid that facilitated analytical, quasi-analytical, and intuitive modes of information acquisition and processing. Diagnostic-aid group differences revealed that the DSS application, which contained a preconfigured set of critical cues and facilitated intuitive information acquisition, assisted the vast majority of inexperienced personnel to extrapolate the most relevant cues from the observation, thereby enabling them to assign an accurate diagnosis in less than five minutes. A DSS of this type has the potential to assist clinicians in primary health care settings (i.e. “competent non-experts” in psychiatric disorders) in the identification, referral, and/or treatment of patients presenting with psychiatric illness.