INFORM: integrated support for decisions and activities in intensive care

Many medical decision support systems that have been developed in the past have failed to enter routine clinical practice. Often this is because the developers have failed to analyse in sufficient detail the precise user requirements, because they have produced a system which takes too narrow a view of the patient, or because the decision support facilities have not been sufficiently well integrated into the routine clinical data handling activities. In this paper we discuss how the AIM-INFORM project is setting out to deal with these issues, in the context of the provision of decision support in the intensive care unit.