Odyssey : a computer program to access medical knowledge

Odyssey is a part of a software package of computing tools designed to aid the third year medical students at the University of Utah while they are on the Internal Medicine clerkship. The Odyssey program is designed to facilitate students' access to selected knowledge bases of high clinical relevance. This thesis describes the experience of adapting the Help's (Health Evaluation through Logic Processing) knowledge base and clinical patient data base as a teaching tool. Odyssey is a free format database management system built on the Macintosh computer. Odyssey manages a HELP knowledge database and a literature database, using a concept called relations to facilitate data retrieval. Communication between the Macintosh and Tandem mainframe has been established to let students explore the HELP system through a Macintosh computer. A relation file can be created to hierarchically group medical concepts together to facilitate the data retrieval.