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Web Information Retrieval for Health Professionals

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Abstract

This paper presents a Web Information Retrieval System (WebIRS), which is designed to assist the healthcare professionals to obtain up-to-date medical knowledge and information via the World Wide Web (WWW). The system leverages the document classification and text summarization techniques to deliver the highly correlated medical information to the physicians. The system architecture of the proposed WebIRS is first discussed, and then a case study on an application of the proposed system in a Hong Kong medical organization is presented to illustrate the adoption process and a questionnaire is administrated to collect feedback on the operation and performance of WebIRS in comparison with conventional information retrieval in the WWW. A prototype system has been constructed and implemented on a trial basis in a medical organization. It has proven to be of benefit to healthcare professionals through its automatic functions in classification and summarizing the medical information that the physicians needed and interested. The results of the case study show that with the use of the proposed WebIRS, significant reduction of searching time and effort, with retrieval of highly relevant materials can be attained.

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Acknowledgment

Acknowledgement is given to Dr. Peter Lo, Dr. Francis Liu, Dr. C.W. Lo and Miss Maggie Poon for their guidance on issues in clinical coding and medical knowledge in general. The authors would also like to express their sincere thanks to the Research Committee of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University for providing the financial support for this research work.

Conflict of interest statement

There are no potential conflicts of interest in this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hung Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    S. L. Ting & Eric W. K. See-To

  2. The York Management School, University of York, Freboys Lane, Heslington, York, YO10 5GD, UK

    Y. K. Tse

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  1. S. L. Ting
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Correspondence to S. L. Ting.

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Ting, S.L., See-To, E.W.K. & Tse, Y.K. Web Information Retrieval for Health Professionals. J Med Syst 37, 9946 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-013-9946-3

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