Enhancing Patient Readability of Discharge Summaries with Automatically Generated Hyperlinks

Patients often have difficulty in understanding medical concepts and vocabulary in their Discharge Summaries. We explore automatic hyper-linking to online resources for difficult terms as a means of making the content more comprehensible for patients. We use the Consumer Health Vocabulary (CHV) as a resource for scoring the difficulty of terms and to provide the most consumerfriendly synonyms. We implement a term extraction component providing semantic annotation using the KIM Knowledge and Information Management Platform. We hyperlink these terms to pages indexed by MedLinePlus to provide consumer-friendly online explanations. A web interface allows for viewing annotated Discharge Summaries and browsing search results. In a preliminary evaluation, the system was used to annotate eight Clinical Management sections of Discharge Summaries. The automatic hyper-linking provides good precision in linking to topically-relevant pages indexed by MedLinePlus. Our approach shows promise as a technology to deploy in future portals where consumers view their Discharge Summaries online.