title: From patient data to information needs.
abstract: The goal of this paper is to contribute to the improvement of the quality of care. For physicians, it is a problem that they are often not aware of gaps in their knowledge and the corresponding information needs. Our research aim is to resolve this problem by formulating information needs automatically. Based on these information needs, patient-specific literature can be retrieved. As a first step, we investigate how to model a physician's information needs. Thereafter, we design and analyse an approach to instantiate the model with patient data, resulting in information-need templates that are able to represent patient-specific information needs. Our experiments show that a physician's information needs can be modelled adequately and can be substantiated into patient-specific information needs. Since the number of formulated information needs is rather high, future research will focus on methods that restrict the set of automatically formulated information needs to a more specialized set.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Knowledge and Agent Technology, Universiteit Maastricht, P.O. Box 616, 6200 MD Maastricht, The Netherlands. L.Braun@cs.unimaas.nl
authors.forename: Loes
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Braun
authors.forename: Floris
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Wiesman
authors.forename: Jaap
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Van den Herik
authors.forename: Arie
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Hasman
authors.forename: Erik
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Korsten
mesh_terms: D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D016347:Medical Records Systems, Computerized; D009426:Netherlands; D010820:Physicians; D011787:Quality of Health Care