KNOWLEDGE RETRIEVAL AS ONE TYPE OF KNOWLEDGE-BASED DECISION-SUPPORT IN MEDICINE - RESULTS OF AN EVALUATION STUDY

We report on a prospective, prolective observational study, supplying information on how physicians and other health care professionals retr ieve medical knowledge on-line within the Heidelberg University Hospit al information system. Within this hospital information system, on-lin e access to medical knowledge has been realised by installing a medica l knowledge server in the range of about 24 GB and by providing access to it by health care professional workstations in wards, physicians' rooms, etc. During the study, we observed about 96 accesses per workin g day. The main group of health care professionals retrieving medical knowledge were physicians and medical students. Primary reasons for it s utilisation were identified as support for the users' scientific wor k (50%), own clinical cases (19%), general medical problems (14%) and current clinical problems (13%). Health care professionals had accesse s to medical knowledge bases such as MEDLINE (79%), drug bases ('Rote Liste', 6%), and to electronic text books and knowledge base systems a s well. Sixty-five percent of accesses to medical knowledge were judge d to be successful. In our opinion, medical knowledge retrieval can se rve as a first step towards knowledge processing in medicine. We point out the consequences for the management of hospital information syste ms in order to provide the prerequisites for such a type of knowledge retrieval.