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

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.