Medical information retrieval and WWW browsers at Mayo.

Medical information retrieval from "Master Sheet" entries specially indexed for research retrieval has been part of the Mayo culture since 1909. Providing easy to use and universally available WWW access to these and other patient information databases at Mayo via browsers, shines a bright light on issues of privacy and confidentiality, user authentication, need to know, data transmission security, and technical details of interfacing disparate databases on a spectrum of platforms to many types of workstations using a variety of browsers. We review our recent experience, and generalize pertinent issues.