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At $1T and growing, the American medical establishment may become one of the largest initial customers for emerging information technologies. This paper reviews basic information access modalities in medicine, including the requirements each modality impose on the use of information technology and the choice of multimedia technology. Application developers must understand the medical user to offer multimedia applications that address actual needs. We also claim that most medical applications must be compatible with existing paradigms, since the main problem with educating medical users is finding time in their schedules. Finally, as an illustration, the paper discusses some of the issues associated with a use of narrowband voice channel used in many medical applications to navigate through and access medical data scripted using a format proposed by Multimedia and Hypermedia Expert Group (MHEG).
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