Table 1.

The four elements of clinical decision making with their benefits and their challenges [47, 50, 52, 55]

Information source	Benefits	Challenges
Professionel expertise	•Human judgement •Experience with specific populations •Includes local context	•Depends on numbers and types of patients seen •Blind trust in the leading authority of clinicians •Variations in practice
Scientific evidence	•Valuable new insights into the (cost-) effectiveness of medical interventions under well-controlled conditions	•Often derived from clinical trials with typically selected groups of patients
		•Difficult to capture personal preferences
		•Limited generalizability
		•Brief follow up and offering only a fragmented ‘’snapshot” view
		•Usually episodically assessment within a hospital setting where patients may behave differently from their usual performance
Patient preferences	•Decision more tailed to individual preferences	•Challenging task on its own
	•Better therapeutic compliance	•Difficult to capture in exact measures
Big data approaches	•Unique perspective of an individual	•Challenging to find suitable datasets
	•Personalized prognosis, treatment predictions and adverse effects	•Leans on clinical expertise •Challenging to use outcomes in daily practice
	•Support for clinicians and patients