Issues in the development of a computer mediated communication system framework for collaborative medical decision making

Medical decision making (MDM) is influenced by a variety of factors such as context, temporal variables, medical literature search, data validation methods, medical representation, diagnostic reasoning used, the selection of formal models for problem solving, etc. On-going research efforts have focused on tailoring EIES II (Electronic Information Exchange System II), a widely used computer mediated communication system (CMCS) developed at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) for medical information interchange. The use of EIES II is envisaged to encourage intelligent medical group collaboration and decision making with the integration of hypermedia and an expert system shell using KEE (Knowledge Engineering Environment) for domain-specific medical problems. The authors place in perspective the development issues of a CMCS framework for medical decision making