Patient friendly Presentation of Electronic Patient Records

Abstract

Reading an electronic patient record (EPR) is a very challenging task because of the medical jargons, which are almost impossible to understand for the layman. This becomes a highly relevant challenge because of the more extensive use of the internet to get medical information. Also the Norwegian laws state that the patient has the right to read his or her own EPR. A master thesis executed in 2006, and a specialization project in 2007 addressed this subject and developed a prototype for adapting EPRs to a patient presentation. This thesis continues this work and aims to extend the system with more functionality and improve the translation of the EPRs. The main issues discussed in the thesis are how disambiguating between Norwegian words and medical terms, provide summaries of EPRs, and supply the patient with external information about his or her health condition. In addition the refined user interface from the specialization project was implemented. The conclusion of this thesis is that the Support Vector Machine classifier with character bigrams provides good and accurate disambiguation between Norwegian words and medical terms. The external information functionality provides correct and quality assured information from the patient hand book. There are still some issues, and possible improvements on providing only precise and relevant articles. Summarizing of EPRs is achieved through named entity extraction of ICD codes, and then presenting the codes together with their corresponding descriptions. This implementation seems to be accurate, correct, and precise.