Methods for Linking EHR Notes to Education Materials

It has been shown that providing patients with access to their 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, including medical terms, abbreviations, and domain-specific language patterns. Furthermore, limited average health literacy forms a barrier for patients to understand their health condition, impeding their ability to actively participate in managing their health. Therefore, we are developing a system to retrieve EHR note-tailored online consumer-oriented health education materials to improve patients’ health knowledge of their own clinical conditions. Our experiments show that queries combining key concepts and other medical concepts present in the EHR notes significantly outperform (more than doubled) a baseline system of using the phrases from topic models.