Information systems can assist in the flow of care in many important ways by making available such key information on patients as laboratory values, by calculating weight-based doses of medications. A longer-term benefit will occur as more sophisticated tools such as computerized algorithms and neural networks . These tools have been developed in order to reduce diagnostic and treatment errors in numerous clinical settings, including the assessment of abdominal pain, chest pain, the detection of breast cancer on screening mammograms ,and the finding of cervical neoplasia on Papanicolaou smears in the United States. Nonetheless, more widespread use of electronic medical records could lead to an expanded role for these applications and make it easier to integrate them into routine care.