A web-based information and decision support system for appropriateness in medicine

In the last few years, the WWW has frequently been used in a variety of applications, to provide up-to-date and platform-independent access to relevant information. In medicine, building and sharing knowledge about new theories, technologies and discoveries is of major concern. In this respect, there is a real need for physicians to be provided with efficient tools that offer targeted access to information about literature, expert opinions, medical statistics and epidemiology, in order to help them in their decision process. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a generic Web-based environment that provides physicians with an integrated access to medical information as well as decision making support facilities. The emphasis is given on the design issues and the benefits of combining several approaches: using structured documents and databases to manage information and, argumentation tools to support the communication. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.