PaniniQA: Enhancing Patient Education Through Interactive Question Answering
This addresses a specific issue for discharged patients by enhancing education through interactive technology, representing an incremental improvement in healthcare applications.
The paper tackles the problem of patients struggling to understand discharge instructions by introducing PaniniQA, an interactive QA system that identifies key clinical content and formulates patient-specific questions, which improved patients' mastery of medical instructions as shown in evaluations.
Patient portal allows discharged patients to access their personalized discharge instructions in electronic health records (EHRs). However, many patients have difficulty understanding or memorizing their discharge instructions. In this paper, we present PaniniQA, a patient-centric interactive question answering system designed to help patients understand their discharge instructions. PaniniQA first identifies important clinical content from patients' discharge instructions and then formulates patient-specific educational questions. In addition, PaniniQA is also equipped with answer verification functionality to provide timely feedback to correct patients' misunderstandings. Our comprehensive automatic and human evaluation results demonstrate our PaniniQA is capable of improving patients' mastery of their medical instructions through effective interactions