Knowledge-based decision support for general practitioners: an integrated design

Abstract

Most decision-support systems (DSSs) in medicine have been developed in hospital environments, for use in hospitals. Only a few are designed for use by general practitioners (GPs) in primary care. The work reported in this paper aims to ( a) design DSSs for GPs in primary care, taking into consideration that primary care is the first level in a health care organization, where the reasons for the patients attendance are seen in a social context; and ( b) integrate three approaches-Hypertext, Knowledge-Based Systems and Online Library-since any one of these will not suffice for the varying needs of GPs.