The HealthDoc Project

Research Goals

health doc Present-day health information material is often limited in its effectiveness by the need to address it to a wide audience. What is generally produced is either a minimal, generic document that contains only the information common to everyone, or a maximal document that tries to provide all the information that might be relevant to someone (but therefore much that is irrelevant to many). However, material that contains irrelevant information, or omits relevant information, or that for any other reason just doesn't seem to be addressed to the particular reader is likely to be discounted or ignored, with consequent problems in motivation for compliance with medical regimens, health-related lifestyle improvements, and so on.

An important trend in health information is patient-centric health care: patient-centric care aims to involve the patient directly in the medical decision-making process by providing better access to the relevant information that patients need to understand their medical condition and to enable them to make more-informed decisions about their prescribed treatment.

An effective means of providing patient-centric healthcare would be through the personalization of health information: with individually tailored information, the patient would be both better-educated about their specific condition and better able to make informed decisions. As a key element in e-health services, personalized health education has great potential to provide relevant, patient-specific information that would integrate the clinical process with "anywhere, anytime" healthcare delivery to produce both better-informed patients and improvements in patient outcomes.

The goal of the HealthDoc Project is to develop Natural Language Generation tools and methodologies that can be used to deliver "on demand" personalized health educational materials through Web and mobile-based information systems. Our current domains of application are tailored diabetes interventions, which we are working on with DPS Health (Los Angeles) and reconstructive breast surgery and cancer survivorship, which we are working on in collaboration with clinicians and patient educators from the Princess Margaret Hospital Cancer Center (Toronto) and the University Health Network at the University of Toronto.

Acknowledgements

HealthDoc is funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) and Avaya (formerly Nortel Networks).

Group Members and Associates

Chrysanne DiMarco, Group Director and Associate Professor,
Cheriton School of Computer Science and Department of English

Dr. Peter Bray, Assistant Professor, Department of Surgery, University of Toronto

H. Dominic Covvey, Founding Director, Waterloo Institute for Health Informatics Research

Vic DiCiccio, Director, Institute for Computer Research and Research Professor,
Cheriton School of Computer Science

Eduard H. Hovy, Director, Natural Language Research Group,
Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California

Dr. Joan Lipa, Associate Professor, Division of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, UCLA

David Wiljer, Director of Knowledge Management and eHealth Innovation for Oncology Education and the Radiation Medicine Program at Princess Margaret Hospital Cancer Centre, University Health NetworkConsultants

Randy Harris, Department of English (Cognitive Rhetoric, Rhetoric of Science, Models of Argumentation)

Neil Randall, Department of English (Rhetoric of User Interfaces, Persuasive Educational Games

Graduate Students

Olga Gladkova, PhD, English (Rhetoric)
George Ross, PhD, English (Linguistics, Health Rhetoric)
Claus Strommer, PhD, Computer Science (Computational Rhetoric)

Research Associates and Scientists

Dr. Elena Afros (Linguistics, Rhetoric)
Jakub Gawryjolek, MMath (Computational Rhetoric, System Developer)
Dr. Andrew Malton (Project Manager, System Architect)
Anna Malton, MSc (Multimedia Authoring Interfaces, System Developer)
Dr. Matthew Skala (Computational Linguistics, System Developer)