The HealthDoc project is presently developing linguistic techniques for producing, on demand, health-education and patient-information brochures that are customized to the medical and personal characteristics of an individual patient.

For each topic, HealthDoc requires a 'master document' written by an expert on the subject with the help of a program called an 'authoring tool'. The writer decides upon the basic elements of the text -- clauses and sentences -- and the patient conditions under which each element should be included in the output. The program assists the writer in building correctly structured master-document fragments and annotating them with the relationships and conditions for inclusion.

When a clinician wishes to give a patient a particular brochure from HealthDoc, she will select it from a menu and specify the name of the patient. HealthDoc will use information from the patient's on-line medical record to then create and print a version of the document appropriate to that patient, by selecting the appropriate pieces of material and then performing the necessary linguistic operations to combine them into a single, coherent text.