Decision support and the medical data environment: an example from breast surgery

Much development work in expert and decision support systems (ES/DSS) has used medicine as its application domain. To be of value to practising clinicians ES/DSS´s must be fully integrated into the medical information environment, and this implies that computer systems offering such support must also provide other information-handling functions or draw on and feed systems which do. The authors have investigated this approach in a pilot project on the identification and surgical management of benign breast disease at the Bloomsbury Breast Clinic. They describe this investigation briefly