ABSTRACT
Introduction This article reviews the human factors associated with real-time, distributed medical decision making, the telecommunication mode that is likely to occur in wartime or other emergency states. We address two questions, one general to distributed decision making, the other specific to medical application of real-time decision making using telecommunication technology in emergencies. The objectives of describing real-time distributed medical decision making are to:
• characterize the relative importance and priority of certain medical informa tion for remote decision making
• to assess the impact of domain expertise (surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses) on information gathering and data interpretation
• to determine how medical performance could be evaluated or mentored remotely and identify uncertainties among remote decision makers viewing events through multimedia telecommunication links
• to make recommendations that have implications for the design of medical telecommunications in support of real-time distributed decision making.
