Iterative refinement of SemLink to enhance patient readability of discharge summaries

A Discharge Summary contains vocabulary that is difficult to understand for health consumers. We used iterative refinements in developing a system, SemLink, which dynamically generate synonyms and hyperlinks to appropriate Internet resources for difficult terms in discharge summary text to make the text more comprehensible to consumers. This paper describes our iterative refinement protocol to enhance the semantic annotation and dynamic hyperlinking algorithms to link topic-specific web pages for difficult terms found occurring in Discharge Summary text.