Applications of Technology: Clini Web: Managing Clinical Information on the World Wide Web

The World Wide Web is a powerful new way to deliver on-line clinical information, but several problems limit its value to health care professionals: content is highly distributed and difficult to find, clinical information is not separated from non-clinical information, and the current Web technology is unable to support some advanced retrieval capabilities. A system called CliniWeb has been developed to address these problems. CliniWeb is an index to clinical information on the World Wide Web, providing a browsing and searching interface to clinical content at the level of the health care student or provider. Its database contains a list of clinical information resources on the Web that are indexed by terms from the Medical Subject Headings disease tree and retrieved with the assistance of SAPHIRE. Limitations of the processes used to build the database are discussed, together with directions for future research. The goal of this paper is to describe an approach to partitioning and managing clinical information on the World Wide Web (WWW).' Although the WWW is a remarkable technological and cooperative human endeavor , it suffers from significant limitations as a quick-access clinical information resource. For example , the distributed nature of its content makes it difficult to find specific information unless one knows where to look. Furthermore, it is difficult to separate clinical from non-clinical information as well as practitioner oriented from consumer-oriented information. This paper describes CliniWeb, a searchable database of clinical, practitioner-oriented information on the WWW. It presents the processes through which sites were identified for inclusion in the database and an Affiliation-of the authors: Biomedical Information Communi-! 273 j index was created. The limitations of these approaches and directions for future research are also discussed.