Early grand challenge papers in health informatics identified numerous challenges, many of which either remain as open questions or have been resolved within fairly narrow domains and generalized solutions have not been developed. These open questions and those resolved but not generalized remain so because underlying research issues have not been resolved. These research issues include the synthesis of information from multiple heterogeneous sources within a user/task context and the delivery of that information in a context and form which the user can understand and appreciate. This paper presents the argument that an interdisciplinary approach based on information retrieval and knowledge management may resolve the two challenges of information synthesis and contextual retrieval.