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AskHERMES: An online question answering system for complex clinical questions
YongGang Cao1, Feifan Liu, Pippa Simpson
1Department of Health Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2400 E. Hartford Avenue, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA.
Journal of Biomedical Informatics
|January 25, 2011
Summary
AskHERMES is a new clinical question answering system that provides answers to complex medical questions. Preliminary evaluations show AskHERMES performs comparably to Google and UpToDate, with potential to outperform them for complex queries.
Area of Science:
- Medical Informatics
- Natural Language Processing
- Clinical Decision Support
Background:
- Clinical questions are often long and complex, requiring sophisticated analysis.
- Existing search engines necessitate query formulation, which can be time-consuming for physicians.
Purpose of the Study:
- To introduce AskHERMES, a novel clinical question answering system.
- To evaluate AskHERMES' performance against established search tools like Google and UpToDate.
Main Methods:
- Developed AskHERMES with innovative approaches in question analysis, summarization, and answer presentation.
- Indexed diverse resources including MEDLINE, PubMed Central, eMedicine, clinical guidelines, and Wikipedia.
- Compared AskHERMES with Google and UpToDate, assessing physician-rated ease of use, answer quality, time spent, and overall performance.
Main Results:
- AskHERMES allows natural language question input with minimal query formulation.
- Physicians found AskHERMES efficient for navigating answer sentences to meet information needs.
- Despite its early stage and limited resources, AskHERMES demonstrated comparable performance to Google and UpToDate, showing potential to outperform them for complex clinical questions.
Conclusions:
- AskHERMES has the potential to support evidence-based medicine practice.
- The system may improve the quality of patient care by providing efficient access to relevant clinical information.
- AskHERMES is available at http://www.AskHERMES.org.
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