Providing Health Information for Patients, Families and the Public

When Dr. Lindberg was sworn in as Director, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) was providing few resources with information useful to the public, having concentrated efforts towards health professionals and scientists. With his arrival, and that of the Internet in the 1990s, NLM embarked on a research and user-focused path towards providing authoritative health information for patients, families and the public. MedlinePlus, NIHSeniorHealth, and MedlinePlus en espanol delivered health information in a variety of formats using text, still images, audio and video. These resources were supported by NLM advisors and Dr. Lindberg's strong belief that patients and families needed easy access to medical information to be able to effectively care for themselves in illness and maintain the best health possible throughout their lives.

[Current Status and Development of Drug Information Infrastructure System for the Public in Japan and Overseas]

With the progress of medical treatment, information on drugs, etc. is overflowing on the media and the Internet, and some of them are leading to uncertain information for the purpose of profit, and some of them are wrong information or inaccurate information, and the effect on the patient is regarded as a problem. In Japan, information on public pharmaceuticals for patients and consumers is provided on the Internet, but its utilization is not sufficient. In the Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Act, it is stated that "Citizens shall endeavor to use pharmaceuticals, etc., properly and deepen their knowledge and understanding of their efficacy and safety". On the other hand, there is a variety of information available on the Internet, and simply searching does not necessarily lead to reliable information. It is necessary to provide information with a mechanism to ensure that the information is reliable so that it can lead to appropriate medical care. Overseas, medical information infrastructure systems, including highly reliable public pharmaceuticals based on evidence, have been developed. Examples include National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom, MedlinePlus in the United States, and National Prescribing Service (NPS) MedicineWise in Australia. In the era of digital health, it is necessary to discuss issues and prospects for the construction and dissemination of information provision infrastructure that meets the needs of patients and consumers from the perspective of industry, government, academia, and patients.

MedlinePlus at 21: A Website Devoted to Consumer Health Information

This report is about the consumer health website MedlinePlus.gov. The latter website was created by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and features content produced by the U.S. National Institutes of Health. The report provides an overview, origin, content, and possible future evolution of the website. The report also spotlights the specific features of the MedlinePlus health topic on health literacy and discusses the PubMed Topic Specific Query on health literacy.

Improving Electronic Health Record Note Comprehension With NoteAid: Randomized Trial of Electronic Health Record Note Comprehension Interventions With Crowdsourced Workers

BACKGROUND

Patient portals are becoming more common, and with them, the ability of patients to access their personal electronic health records (EHRs). EHRs, in particular the free-text EHR notes, often contain medical jargon and terms that are difficult for laypersons to understand. There are many Web-based resources for learning more about particular diseases or conditions, including systems that directly link to lay definitions or educational materials for medical concepts.

OBJECTIVE

Our goal is to determine whether use of one such tool, NoteAid, leads to higher EHR note comprehension ability. We use a new EHR note comprehension assessment tool instead of patient self-reported scores.

METHODS

In this work, we compare a passive, self-service educational resource (MedlinePlus) with an active resource (NoteAid) where definitions are provided to the user for medical concepts that the system identifies. We use Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) to recruit individuals to complete ComprehENotes, a new test of EHR note comprehension.

RESULTS

Mean scores for individuals with access to NoteAid are significantly higher than the mean baseline scores, both for raw scores (P=.008) and estimated ability (P=.02).

CONCLUSIONS

In our experiments, we show that the active intervention leads to significantly higher scores on the comprehension test as compared with a baseline group with no resources provided. In contrast, there is no significant difference between the group that was provided with the passive intervention and the baseline group. Finally, we analyze the demographics of the individuals who participated in our AMT task and show differences between groups that align with the current understanding of health literacy between populations. This is the first work to show improvements in comprehension using tools such as NoteAid as measured by an EHR note comprehension assessment tool as opposed to patient self-reported scores.

Bee Swarm Optimization for Medical Web Information Foraging

The present work is related to Web intelligence and more precisely to medical information foraging. We present here a novel approach based on agents technology for information foraging. An architecture is proposed, in which we distinguish two important phases. The first one is a learning process for localizing the most relevant pages that might interest the user. This is performed on a fixed instance of the Web. The second takes into account the openness and the dynamicity of the Web. It consists on an incremental learning starting from the result of the first phase and reshaping the outcomes taking into account the changes that undergoes the Web. The whole system offers a tool to help the user undertaking information foraging. We implemented the system using a group of cooperative reactive agents and more precisely a colony of artificial bees. In order to validate our proposal, experiments were conducted on MedlinePlus, a benchmark dedicated for research in the domain of Health. The results are promising either for those related to Web regularities and for the response time, which is very short and hence complies the real time constraint.

A Novel Framework for Medical Web Information Foraging Using Hybrid ACO and Tabu Search

We present in this paper a novel approach based on multi-agent technology for Web information foraging. We proposed for this purpose an architecture in which we distinguish two important phases. The first one is a learning process for localizing the most relevant pages that might interest the user. This is performed on a fixed instance of the Web. The second takes into account the openness and dynamicity of the Web. It consists on an incremental learning starting from the result of the first phase and reshaping the outcomes taking into account the changes that undergoes the Web. The system was implemented using a colony of artificial ants hybridized with tabu search in order to achieve more effectiveness and efficiency. To validate our proposal, experiments were conducted on MedlinePlus, a real website dedicated for research in the domain of Health in contrast to other previous works where experiments were performed on web logs datasets. The main results are promising either for those related to strong Web regularities and for the response time, which is very short and hence complies the real time constraint.