Expert Witness: A system for developing expert medical testimony

Expert Witness in an expert system designed to assist attorneys and medical experts in determining the merit of medical malpractice claims in the area of obstetrics. It substitutes the time of the medical expert with the time of a paralegal assistant guided by the expert system during the initial investigation of the medical records and patient interviews. The product of the system is a narrative transcript containing important data, immediate conclusions from the data, and overall conclusions of the case that the attorney and medical expert use to make decisions about whether and how to proceed with the case. The transcript may also contain directives for gathering additional information needed for the case. The system is a modified heuristic classifier and is implemented using over 600 CLIPS rules together with a C-based user interface. The data abstraction and solution refinement are implemented directly using forward chaining production and matching. The use of CLIPS and C is essential to delivering a system that runs on a generic PC platform. The direct implementation in CLIPS together with locality of inference ensures that the system will scale gracefully. Two years of use has revealed no errors in the reasoning.