Navigating to knowledge

One way to fulfill point-of-care knowledge needs is to present caregivers with a visual representation of the available "answers". Using such a representation, caregivers can recognize what they want, rather than have to recall what they need, and then navigate to an appropriate answer. Given selected pieces of information from a computer-based patient record, an interface can anticipate certain knowledge needs by initializing caregiver navigation in a semantic neighborhood of answers likely to be relevant to the patient at hand. These notions draw heavily on two collaborative projects--the U.S. National Library of Medicine Unified Medical Language System and the U.S. National Cancer Institute Knowledge Server. Both of these projects support navigation because they make the structure of medical knowledge explicit in a way that can be exploited by human interfaces.