Knowledge Representation and Management: Towards Patient Health Self-management

Abstract

OBJECTIVES: To summarize excellent current research in the field of knowledge representation and management (KRM). METHOD: A synopsis of the articles selected for the IMIA Yearbook 2012 is provided and an attempt to highlight the current trends in the field of health management is sketched. RESULTS: Among the five selected papers, two confirm the benefit of exploiting open-source language toolkits for the automatic extraction of medical concepts, assertions and/or relationships from clinical texts. One paper aims at exploiting domain-specific terminologies to improve the parsing of biomedical noun phrases, and another one aims at discovering rare diseases associations embedded into disparate textual sources. Finally, the last paper describes a collaborative search approach integrated into a homegrown EHR search engine. CONCLUSIONS: This selected set of papers confirms that natural language processing, as well as knowledge extraction, discovering and retrieval, are still active and fruitful research fields. Although these papers are not directly focusing on personal health informatics applications,, important features are highlighted and tailored to fit the requirements of patient health self-management. Delivering timely, friendly and secure access to functional, accurate, up-to-date and sustainable personal health records is a significant challenging task for supporting self-managed healthcare.