Towards Patient-Related Information Needs

The quality of health care depends, among others, on the quality of a physician's domain knowledge. Since it is impossible to keep up with all new findings and developments, physicians usually have gaps in their domain knowledge. To handle exceptional cases, access to the full range of medical literature is required. The specific literature needed for appropriate treatment of the patient is described by a physician's information need. Physicians are often unaware of their information needs. To support them, this paperThis research is part of the MIA project (Medical Information Agent), which is funded by NWO (grant number 634.000.021). aims at presenting a first step towards automatically formulating patient-related information needs. We start investigating how we can model a physician's information needs in general. Then we propose an approach to instantiate the model into a representation of a physician's information needs using the patient data as stored in a medical record. Our experiments show that this approach is feasible. Since the number of formulated patient-related information needs is rather high, we propose the use of filters. Future research will focus on the combination of personalization and filtering. It is expected that the resultant set of information needs will have a manageable size and contributes to the quality of health care.