New Resources for e-Patients

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): New Resources for e-Patients addresses the unmet medical needs of consumers who search for health and healthcare information online, currently a population of more than 160 million people in the U.S. It will fill gaps and address deficiencies in currently available online health information resources. It will maximize the value of public domain health information from U.S. Government sources. Textual consumer health information will be collected from NIH, FDA and other government sources. This information will be subjected to automated topic analysis and classification using methods of natural language processing and statistical text-mining to discover and extract topics on i) diseases and conditions; ii) treatments, benefits and risks; and iii) genomic risks and responses. These topics will be integrated and mapped to the most frequent health topics of interest to consumers. Personally-controlled electronic health records and personal genotypes will be studied for their potential contributions to personalized medicine for e-patients. Phase I of this project will achieve proof-of-principle and develop an advanced prototype as a foundation for construction of a new web-based resource in Phase II. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: This project addresses the unmet medical needs of consumers who search for health and healthcare information online, currently a population of more than 160 million people in the U.S. It will fill gaps and address deficiencies in current online health information resources and also target new opportunities in genomic and personalized medicine. In the process we will create consumer-friendly, automated systems that make online information search and retrieval more efficient more efficient and maximize the value of public domain health information from U.S. Government sources. The work will lead to more reliable, personalized and actionable information for a new generation of web-savvy and socially-networked e-patients and will lead to more efficient and productive encounters between patients and healthcare systems.