Internet-based decision-support server for acute abdominal pain

The paper describes conception and prototypical design of a decision-support server for acute abdominal pain. Existing formal methods to develop and exchange scores, guidelines and algorithms are used for integration. For scoring systems a work-up to separate terminological information from structure is described. The terminology is separately stored in a data dictionary and the structure in a knowledge base. This procedure enables a reuse of terminology for documentation and decision-support. The whole system covers a decision-support server written in C++ with underlying data dictionary and knowledge base, a documentation module written in Java and a CORBA middleware that establishes a connection via Internet.