title: Challenges and methodology for indexing the computerized patient record.
abstract: Patient records contain most crucial documents for managing the treatments and healthcare of patients in the hospital. Retrieving information from these records in an easy, quick and safe way helps care providers to save time and find important facts about their patient's health. This paper presents the scalability issues induced by the indexing and the retrieval of the information contained in the patient records. For this study, EasyIR, an information retrieval tool performing full text queries and retrieving the related documents has been used. An evaluation of the performance reveals that the indexing process suffers from overhead consequence of the particular structure of the patient records. Most IR tools are designed to manage very large numbers of documents in a single index whereas in our hypothesis, one index per record, which usually implies few documents, has been imposed. As the number of modifications and creations of patient records are significant in a day, using a specialized and efficient indexation tool is required.
authors.affiliation: Artificial Intelligence laboratory, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland. ehrler@cui.unige.ch
authors.forename: Frédéric
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Ehrler
authors.forename: Patrick
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Ruch
authors.forename: Antoine
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Geissbuhler
authors.forename: Christian
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Lovis
mesh_terms: D000043:Abstracting and Indexing / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D016347:Medical Records Systems, Computerized