Right information, right patient, right time: Intelligent content searching supporting point-of-care applications

Rapid changes in clinical practice, geometric growth in medical knowledge, and shortened time for consultation have put increasing pressure on health care providers. Recent attention on the prevalence of medical errors has focused further attention on the provider. Frequently, clinicians require more information to make decisions at the point-of-care. Obtaining answers to their questions is often difficult and time consuming. Quick and easy access to clinical information at the point-of-care is essential to good patient care and for preventing medical errors. Unfortunately, the existing technologies of CD-ROM-based medical references medical literature, searches, and web-based knowledge-bases do not provide the information fast enough, or in an easily digestible format. This paper describes the collaboration between Intelligent Medical Objects (IMO) and the Cambridge University, Department of Medical Informatics to extend the Wax(1) electronic reference system to support intelligent searching. This collaboration created a new electronic publishing technology, called I-Wax, which allows for searching of on-line multimedia, medical references based on concept, rather than just text. The I-Wax search includes weighted-concept-tagging at the book, chapter, section, and paragraph levels. This paper discusses the I-Wax process and issues that need to be considered when developing applications to tag and display complex healthcare content Finally we discuss how such technology could be integrated with point-of-care applications.