title: Leveraging dialog systems research to assist biomedical researchers' interrogation of Big Clinical Data.
abstract: The worldwide adoption of electronic health records (EHR) promises to accelerate clinical research, which lies at the heart of medical advances. However, the interrogation of such Big Data by clinical researchers can be laborious and error-prone, involving iterative and ineffective communication of data requests to data analysts. Research on this communication process is rare. There also exists no contemporary system that offers intelligent solutions to assist clinical researchers in their quest for clinical data. In this article, we first provide a detailed characterization of the challenges encountered in this communication space. Second, we identify promising synergies between fields studying human-to-human and human-machine communication that can shed light on biomedical data query mediation. We propose a mixed-initiative dialog-based approach to support autonomous clinical data access and recommend needed technology development and communication study for accelerating clinical research.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University, 622 W. 168th Street, New York, NY, USA. Electronic address: jh3587@cumc.columbia.edu.
authors.forename: Julia
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hoxha
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University, 622 W. 168th Street, New York, NY, USA. Electronic address: chunhua@columbia.edu.
authors.forename: Chunhua
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Weng
mesh_terms: D035843:Biomedical Research; D003142:Communication; D057286:Electronic Health Records; D006801:Humans; D008490:Medical Informatics / Q000639:trends*; D012108:Research Personnel
keywords: Comparative effectiveness research; Health communication; Information storage and retrieval