An intelligent interactive system for delivering individualized information to patients

Abstract

This paper is a report on the first phase of a long-term, interdisciplinary project whose goal is to increase the overall effectiveness of physicians' time, and thus the quality of health care, by improving the information exchange between physicians and patients in clinical settings. We are focusing on patients with long-term and chronic conditions, initially on migraine patients, who require periodic interaction with their physicians for effective management of their condition. We are using medical informatics to focus on the information needs of patients, as well as of physicians, and to address problems of information exchange. This requires understanding patients' concerns to design an appropriate system, and using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence techniques to build an interactive explanation system. In contrast to many other knowledge-based systems, our system's design is based on empirical data on actual information needs. We used ethnographic techniques to observe explanations actually given in clinic settings, and to conduct interviews with migraine sufferers and physicians. Our system has an extensive knowledge base that contains both general medical terminology and specific knowledge about migraine, such as common trigger factors and symptoms of migraine, the common therapies, and the most common effects and side effects of those therapies. The system consists of two main components: (a) an interactive history-taking module that collects information from patients prior to each visit, builds a patient model, and summarizes the patients' status for their physicians; and (b) an intelligent explanation module that produces an interactive information sheet containing explanations in everyday language that are tailored to individual patients, and responds intelligently to follow-up questions about topics covered in the information sheet.

Natural language processing in mental health applications using non-clinical texts

“…(Binstead, Cawsey and Jones 1995). Similar work used hypertext pages for Migraine patients (Buchanan et al 1995), cancer patients and to accompany prescriptions (De Carolis et al 1996) have also been described. Tailored patient information systems have shown to be more effective than non-tailored computer system (or leaflets).…”

Refining instructional text generation after evaluation

“…Like in any medical decision support activity, explanations are an important by-product of this system, as they substantiate its suggestions, by favouring, at the same time, compliance and correct treatment performance [5,8,9]. To achieve their goals, these messages have to be formulated in a clear and convincing way and their arguments have to be adapted to the addressee.…”

An intelligent partner system for improving chronic illness care

“…Methods of computational linguistics help to automatically produce texts that are sensitive to the patient's needs and the history of questions and answers that have been exchanged thus far. 26 In addition to receiving customised information, the elderly and disabled, for example, can use various types of memory and/or packaging aids to take the medication as intended. These support tools include calendars, pre-packaged doses in envelopes (marked with the time and day of administration) and the Dosette, a plastic box with 28 compartments for holding seven days' medication.…”