The HealthDoc Project is centred at the University of Waterloo and involves Chrysanne DiMarco and her students, with the additional participation of Graeme Hirst and his students at the University of Toronto and Eduard Hovy from the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California. It is advised by patient-education committees of Peel Memorial Hospital (Brampton, Ontario), Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre (University of Toronto), and Massachusetts General Hospital (Boston), and by Dominic Covvey (Health Information Technology Advisors, Inc.), a consultant on medical informatics and technology transfer.

The problem with generic health information
 
Present-day health-information and patient-education 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 or a maximal document that tries to provide all the information that might be relevant to someone. But in either case, documents that just don't seem to be addressed to the particular reader are likely to be discounted or ignored, with consequent problems in compliance with prescribed medical regimens, health-related lifestyle improvements, and so on.

The effectiveness of customization
 
However, health educators have recognized that patient-information documents can be much more effective if they are customized for individual readers in accordance with their medical conditions, demographic variables, personality profile, or other relevant factors. But, given all the different factors, the total number of different possible combinations of a particular document can easily be in the tens or hundreds of thousands, impossible to manually produce and distribute.

The need for automated document tailoring
 
What is needed is a natural language generation system for the production of tailored health-information and patient-education documents, that would, on demand, customize a "master document" to the needs of a particular individual. Building such a system is the goal of the HealthDoc project.

A demonstration of a customizable Web page
 
For a more detailed explanation, see our on-line demo of WebbeDoc, an application of the concepts and techniques of HealthDoc, which customizes a Web page describing the HealthDoc project according to a profile of the individual reader.

History
 
The HealthDoc project began in March 1995, following a year of planning, in collaboration with the TechDoc project at Forschungsinstitut für anwendungsorientierte Wissensverarbeitung (FAW), Ulm, Germany (Thomas Rose (director), Dietmar Rösner (former director), and staff). HealthDoc is funded by Technology Ontario and the Information Technology Research Centre.