A medical device, such as an infusion pump, obtains a contextual awareness of its operation by communicating with centralized patient records and or other medical equipment communicating with a common patient, and/or provides real time advisory information, at care point or remotely. A protocol obtained by the medical device from a protocol server provides context-aware protocols and necessary predicate information for those protocols. This predicate information may be discovered by the medical device communicating with electronic medical records and the associated medical equipment.