Information retrieval in medicine: The electronic medical record as a new domain

This paper presents a document-centered approach to electronic health records as an information retrieval problem. It is clear that passage retrieval researchers working in the field of information science have seen similar values in document passages as have researchers in medical informatics. Without either literature acknowledging the other, workers in both camps have identified the same potential in document structure, labels, specificity and explicit hierarchies of knowledge for signaling relevance to the reader. The National Health Information Infrastructure Initiative (http://aspe.hhs.gov/sp/nhii/) identifies academics and researchers as natural stakeholders, like clinicians and caregivers, in enabling better healthcare through better information sharing (National Committee on Vital and Health Statistics, 2003). Information science has much to contribute to the health information technology arena and to electronic health records in particular: their development, their maintenance, and most importantly their improvement to serve the needs of diverse users