MEDICINFOSYS: AN ARCHITECTURE FOR AN EVIDENCE-BASED MEDICAL INFORMATION RESEARCH AND DELIVERY SYSTEM

Abstract

Due to the complicated nature of medical information needs, the time constraints of clinicians, and the linguistic complexities and sheer volume of medical information, most medical questions go unanswered. It has been shown that nearly all of these questions can be answered with the presently available medical sources and that when these questions get answered, patient health benefits. In this work, we design and describe a framework for Evidence-Based medical information research and delivery, MedicInfoSys. This system leverages the strengths of knowledge-based workers and of mature knowledge-based technologies within the medical domain. The most critical element of this framework, is a search interface, PifMed. PifMed uses gold-standard MeSH categorization (presently integrated into medline) as the basis of a navigational structure, which allows users to browse search results with an interactive tree of categories. Evaluation by user study shows it to be superior to PubMed, in terms of speed and usability.