Health Online through Language a Medical Exchange System (HOLMES)

The amount of information available from medical journals, patient records, and the cloud has increased beyond the point where clinicians can manage it using traditional means. Many clinical decision support systems (CDSS) have been created to manage this complexity, but these systems are often narrowly focused on a domain, quickly grow stale as new treatments become available, and do not account for variation in terminology. To address these needs, we are pleased to offer Health Online through Language a Medical Exchange System (HOLMES), a system for predicting provisional diagnoses, providing clinical decision support, and improving outcomes for patients with mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Like IBM"s Watson, HOLMES takes a natural language query, retrieves relevant information, performs inference with this information, and returns an answer along with an associated probability and pointers back to the information it used to draw its conclusion. HOLMES offers on-the-fly information retrieval without the requirement of a supercomputer to maintain and operate a huge data store.