Alexandra Bayão Horta , the director of the Service of Internal Medicine at Hospital da Luz Lisboa, concluded, on February this year, her doctorate in Medicine (Clinical Research), at the Faculty of Medical Sciences (Nova Medical School), Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Her thesis, that earned the unanimous approval of the jury, with distinction and honour, approaches the topic “Co-management in Colorectal Surgery”. The research developed in the scope of the doctorate found decision support models for selecting patients of colorectal surgery for co-management. Two instruments of support to the clinical decision were created, one to be applied in preoperative stage and another destined to postoperative stage. Both tools are available in software applications (one in Power BI and the other as an online calculator) for practical use. Co-management consists in the organization of interdisciplinary collaboration in healthcare to hospitalized patients, where two specialties assume the clinical responsibility of the treatment and clinical management of the patient. More often, co-management is applied between medical and surgical specialties, but it is applicable to other specialties on the basis of patients’ needs. In the conclusions, Alexandra Bayão Horta highlights, among other aspects, that these decision support models “enable to codify in an explicit way, the implicit knowledge existing among the physicians of an organization, conferring robustness to the organization, capacity to disseminate the codified knowledge, objectification (that allows continual auditing and improvement) and acceleration of integration of objective evidence and individual expertise”. Miguel Xavier and Ana Luísa Papoila, from Nova Medical School, and Susana Vieira, from Instituto Superior Técnico, were the thesis advisors. Alexandra Bayão Horta is a medical founder of Hospital da Luz Lisboa and, besides director of the Service of Internal Medicine (since 2016), she is director of Medical Internship. In the specialty of Internal Medicine, she has for dedicated areas autoimmune diseases and co-management of hospitalized patients. In the phot above , the new doctor in medicine and the jury: José Mendes de Almeida, from Faculdade de Medicina, Universidade de Lisboa (FMUL), José Pereira Miguel (FMUL), António Sousa Guerreiro (Nova Medical School), Alexandra Bayão Horta, Ana Luísa Papoila (Nova Medical School) and João Miguel Sousa (Instituto Superior Técnico).
