Authors:
Roelof Reinders
;
Annette Ten Teije
and
Zhisheng Huang
Affiliation:
VU University Amsterdam, Netherlands
Keyword(s):
Medical Guidelines, Evidence-based Medicine, Medical Guideline Updates.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Biomedical Engineering
;
Decision Support Systems
;
Electronic Health Records and Standards
;
Evaluation and Use of Healthcare IT
;
Health Information Systems
;
Software Systems in Medicine
Abstract:
Medical guidelines are documents that describe optimal treatment for patients by medical practitioners based
on current medical research (evidence), in the form of step-by-step recommendations. Because the field of
medical research is very large and always evolving, keeping these guidelines up-to-date with the current state
of the art is a difficult task. In this paper, we propose a method for finding relevant evidence for supporting
the medical guideline updating process. Our method that takes from the evidence-based medical guideline
the recommendations and their corresponding evidence as its input, and that queries PubMed, the world’s
largest search engine for medical citations, for potential new or improved evidence. We built a prototype and
performed a feasibility study on a set of old recommendations, and compared the output to evidence for the
newer version. The system succeeded in finding goal articles for 11 out of 16 recommendations, but in total,
only 20 out of 71 articles
were retrieved. Our ranking method for most relevant articles worked well for small
result sets, but for large result sets it failed to rank the goal articles in the top 25 results.
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