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The use of clinical decision support systems to facilitate the practice of evidence-based medicine promises to substantially improve health care quality.

Designing a Web system for elderly patients requires attention to the users' functional impairments and inexperience with computers. The authors reviewed published guides for the design of Web-based clinical systems for elderly patients and identified additional design considerations that have not been reported in the literature. The resulting recommendations are related to the system interface, the training and support of users, and the content of Web pages. The recommendations can [...]

The authors describe and illustrate an integrated trio of software programs for carrying out surface-based analyses of cerebral cortex. The first component of this trio, SureFit (Surface Reconstruction by Filtering and Intensity Transformations), is used primarily for cortical segmentation, volume visualization, surface generation, and the mapping of functional neuroimaging data onto surfaces. The second component, Caret (Computerized Anatomical Reconstruction and Editing Tool Kit), provides a wide range of surface visualization [...]

To observe how electronic messaging between a hospital consultant and general practitioners (GPs) in 15 practices about patients suffering from diabetes evolved over a 3-year period after an initial 1-year study.

In 1998, the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) published a white paper entitled "Guidelines for the Clinical Use of Electronic Mail with Patients," which outlined a practical framework for this interaction. Interest in the use of other Internet-based tools, such as the World Wide Web, to enhance clinical communication is increasing. In such systems, static information can be made centrally available to patients and interactive tools such as messaging systems [...]

The National Library of Medicine's MEDLINE (MEDLARS Online) database was the first database to be searched nationwide via value-added telecommunication networks. Now available on the World Wide Web free of charge from the National Library of Medicine and from many other sources, it is the world's most heavily used medical database. MEDLINE is unique in that each reference to the medical literature is indexed under a controlled vocabulary called Medical [...]

Increasing data suggest that error in medicine is frequent and results in substantial harm. The recent Institute of Medicine report (LT Kohn, JM Corrigan, MS Donaldson, eds: To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1999) described the magnitude of the problem, and the public interest in this issue, which was already large, has grown.