Demographic information about a specific subset of patients can help physicians recognize conditions they do not expect to find in the larger population.
The early diagnosis of Alzheimer disease is a boon in that it enables advance planning, but that planning process can engender conflict between respect for future-oriented autonomy and future welfare.
The WHO Clinical Staging System for HIV/AIDS allows physicians in resource-limited settings to make clinical decisions based on patient clinical features instead of laboratory tests.
Clinical decision making calls for use of both explicit and tacit knowledge despite evidence-based medicine's assumption that explicit information is sufficient.