We have developed a mobile messaging system designed for use in the clinic setting. The system is designed to facilitate quick, informal, interactions that occur in a clinical setting, e.g., requests for assistance or information. The system includes safeguards to make sure that the sender of a message is aware if a message is not read in a timely fashion. Evaluation of the system shows message delivery was about 50% slower than our target of 30 seconds. Although the mobile device used is fairly small when combined with a radio unit, it is too bulky and users did not necessarily carry the system with them. This led to delays (over eleven minutes on average) before messages were seen. We expect that improvements in hardware and clinical software will lead to more common use of such adjunct software systems.

ScroungeMaster provides an alternative to conventional access to laboratory information. A mobile, pen-based system with connection to at Stanford University Medical Center's (SUMC) main laboratory computer, the program retrieves selected patient lab data and stores them in a local database cache. Optimized for displaying information by physiologic system, the software uses a context-sensitive display algorithm to determine how lab information is presented. The goal of the project is to decrease access time and increase readability of lab information for the surgical resident.

An architecture built from five software components -a Router, Parser, Matcher, Mapper, and Server -fulfills key requirements common to several point-of-care information and knowledge processing tasks. The requirements include problem-list creation, exploiting the contents of the Electronic Medical Record for the patient at hand, knowledge access, and support for semantic visualization and software agents. The components use the National Library of Medicine Unified Medical Language System to create and exploit lexical closure-a state in which terms, text and reference models are represented explicitly and consistently. Preliminary versions of the components are in use in an oncology knowledge server.

Although considerable effort has been put into creating extensive on-line reference resources for oncology, this compiled knowledge is underutilized in clinical situations. The Mobile Access To Oncology Knowledge (MATOK) project facilitates access to a variety of knowledge sources by providing a system designed to be used at the point-of-care. The system's key characteristics are mobility, homogeneous access, concept-based searching, step-wise refinement, and integration with on-line patient data.

Oncologists' information needs arise at diverse times and settings. For example: "Is superior vena cava syndrome a medical emergency?" Our collaborative group is developing a system that supports an interface with combinations of spoken, gestural, and simulated three-dimensional manipulation to help an oncologist focus on the information need, not the system. The system requires a small amount of input from the oncologist, and then anticipates what information is pertinent to the patient at hand, based on the sources it has available. The system makes use of a "Knowledge Server" to find relevant information. The Knowledge Server uses selected data for the particular patient from a Computer-based Patient Record (CPR) to provide context for the information needs. The Knowledge Server leverages the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) resources as well as relevant communications standards. A layered, interaction protocol is used to help manage the fulfillment of information needs. Each of the oncology knowledge sources is transformed into a uniform representation that utilizes both its formal schema (e.g., its table of contents) and its concepts and words indexed through the UMLS Metathesaurus. Our focus on the appropriate use of information from a CPR, and on anticipating oncologists' information needs, resulted from our study of several longitudinal patient scenarios. We believe that our use of scenario-based design techniques will help to ensure the system's success.