Vaidurya--a concept-based, context-sensitive search engine for clinical guidelines

Abstract

A major problem in the effective use of clinical guidelines is fast and accurate access at the point of care. Thus, we are developing a digital electronic guideline library (DeGeL) and a set of tools for incremental conversion of free-text guide-lines into increasingly machine-comprehensible representations, which support automated application. Even if guidelines are represented in electronic fashion, care providers need to be able to quickly retrieve the guidelines that best fit the clinical situation at hand. We describe Vaidurya, a search and retrieval engine that exploits the hybrid nature of guideline representation in the DeGeL architecture. Vaidurya can use not only free-text keywords, but also multiple semantic indices along which the guidelines are classified, and the mark up of guidelines in DeGeL, using the semantic roles of one or more guideline-representation languages. Preliminary evaluation of Vaidurya in a standard information task and a large guide-line repository is encouraging; formal evaluation is under way.