Designing for Human Use

In August of 1980 Stanford hosted the annual Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, and we organized a twoday tutorial program so that local physicians who were interested could learn about this emerging discipline. In addition, funding from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation allowed us to support a questionnaire-based project to assess physicians' attitudes. Finally, a doctoral student in educational psychology, Randy Teach, joined the project that summer and brought with him much-needed skills in the areas of statistics, study design, and the use of computer-based statistical packages. The resulting study used the physicians who were attending the AIM tutorial as subjects, with a control group of M.D.'s drawn from the surrounding community. Chapter 34 summarizes the results and concludes with design recommendations derived from the data analysis. The reader is referred to that chapter for details; however, it is pertinent to reiterate here that a program's ability to give explanations for its reasoning was judged to be the single most important requirement for an advice-giving system in medicine. This observation accounts for our continued commitment to research on explanation, both in the ONCOCIN program (Langlotz and Shortliffe, 1983) and in current doctoral dissertations from the Heuristic Programming Project (Cooper, 1984; Kunz, 1984).