to support patient treatment priorities and quality-of-life tradeoffs. specific document
Each department—radiology, pharmacy, lab, admissions—often ran its own incompatible system. A patient’s X-ray report could not be automatically linked to their lab results. Data integration was manual and error-prone. medinfo 1.0
A defining characteristic of Medinfo 1.0 was the struggle for . Without standardized terminologies, data was “digital” but not “understandable” across contexts. This led to the creation of foundational standards: ICD-9 (International Classification of Diseases) for diagnoses, SNOMED (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine) for clinical terms, and HL7 (Health Level Seven) for message exchange. These were not glamorous innovations, but they were the Rosetta Stones of the era. Similarly, the rise of evidence-based medicine in the 1990s, championed by Archie Cochrane and David Sackett, demanded that Medinfo 1.0 systems begin to store not just raw data but also structured evidence—leading to pioneers like the Cochrane Library and early clinical decision support systems (e.g., MYCIN and DXplain), though the latter were largely research tools, not bedside realities. Data integration was manual and error-prone