Methods for linking EHR notes to education materials

Abstract

It has been shown that accessing the patients' own electronic health records (EHR) can enhance their medical understanding and provide clinically relevant benefits. However, languages that are difficult for non-medical professionals to comprehend are prevalent in the EHR notes. The valuable and authoritative information contained in the EHR is thus less accessible to the patients, who ultimately stand to benefit the most from the information. To address this challenge, we are developing a system to retrieve EHR note-specific online consumer-oriented health education materials. We explored several query generation methods to convert long EHR notes to effective queries, including topic models and key concept identification. Our experiments show that queries using key concepts identified by a learning based model with pseudo-relevance feedback significantly outperform the baseline system of using the full text note.