Jones B T
Department of Psychology of Glasgow University, Scotland, UK.
Comput Nurs. 1991 Mar-Apr;9(2):52-60.
Previous articles in this journal testify that nursing expert systems have become a feature of nursing information technology and nursing theory. Regretfully, experts' knowledge is not easy to elicit and computer systems are not easy to program. Fortunately, expert system shells bypass most of the problems associated with programming expert systems. Lesser known but with no less impact are shells that bypass the other difficult phase of expert system construction, namely knowledge elicitation. The major aim of this article is to provide a nontechnical description of such a shell and the use to which we have put it within three quite different areas of nursing. In addition, the article introduces expert systems in nursing as a potentially unifying development in a profession rapidly undergoing specialization.
