Using Discharge Summaries to Improve Information Retrieval in Clinical Domain
Dongqing Zhu, Wu Stephen, Masanz James, Ben Carterette, Hongfang Liu · 2015
simulated web searches for health information by patients. The web searches were designed to be connected to hospital discharge summaries from the patient’s Electronic Medical Record (EMR), thus effectually modeling a post-visit information need. We primarily investigated three research questions about the retrieval of medical information from the web: 1) to what degree retrieval techniques effective in searching Elec-tronic Medical Records (EMRs) could aid in finding medical web docu-ments; 2) to what degree medical web retrieval would benefit from natu-ral language processing (NLP) techniques that extract information from text based on medical knowledge; and 3) how to leverage contextual information in the patient’s discharge summaries to improve retrieval. We submitted seven runs to ShARe/CLEF eHealth. Our best run used effective EMR-based IR techniques, NLP-produced information, and in-formation in patients ’ discharge summaries to achieve precision at 10 (P@10) scores at or above the CLEF median for all but 2 of 50 test queries.