Abstract
Health-education documents can be much more effective in achieving patient compliance if they are customized for individual readers. For this purpose, a medical record can be thought of as an extremely detailed user model of a reader of such a document. The HealthDoc project is developing methods for producing health-information and patient-education documents that are tailored to the individual personal and medical characteristics of the patients who receive them. Information from an on-line medical record or from a clinician will be used as the primary basis for deciding how best to fit the document to the patient. In this paper, we describe our research on three aspects of the project: the kinds of tailoring that are appropriate for health-education documents; the nature of a tailorable master document, and how it can be created; and the linguistic problems that arise when a tailored instance of the document is to be generated.
The HealthDoc project is supported by a grant from Technology Ontario, administered by the Information Technology Research Centre. Vic DiCiccio was instrumental in helping us to obtain the grant, and has been invaluable in subsequent administration. The other members of the HealthDoc project have contributed to the work described here, especially Steve Banks, Phil Edmonds, Mary Ellen Foster, Bruce Jakeway, Jon Litchfield, Daniel Marcu, Peter Vanderheyden, Leo Wanner, John Wilkinson, and Susan Williams. Victor Strecher and Sarah Kobrin kindly discussed details of their research with us. We are grateful to Dominic Covvey, Brigitte Grote, Manfred Stede, Dietmar Rösner, John Bateman, and the patient-education committees of our partner hospitals—Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre (University of Toronto), Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston), and Peel Memorial Hospital (Brampton, Ontario)— for helpful advice, insightful discussions, and other contributions.
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© 1997 Springer-Verlag Wien
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Hirst, G., DiMarco, C., Hovy, E., Parsons, K. (1997). Authoring and Generating Health-Education Documents That Are Tailored to the Needs of the Individual Patient. In: Jameson, A., Paris, C., Tasso, C. (eds) User Modeling. International Centre for Mechanical Sciences, vol 383. Springer, Vienna. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-2670-7_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-7091-2670-7_14
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