PrimeAnswers: A practical interface for answering primary care questions.

This paper describes an institutional approach taken to build a primary care reference portal. The objective for the site is to make access to and use of clinical reference faster and easier and to facilitate the use of evidence-based answers in daily practice. Reference objects were selected and metadata applied to a core set of sources.

Information in context: integrating information specialists into practice settings.

An information need (the problem) cannot be divorced from its context. The problem context determines the urgency, granularity of detail, authority, and level of certainty required for an acceptable answer and dictates the expertise and resources that can be brought to bear. The size and diversity of the sources that can be marshalled during clinical problem solving is cognitively unmanageable--too large and too complex for a single person to process effectively in a constrained timeframe.