Information Retrieval: A Health Care Perspective (Book Review)

I must confess to being hesitant when asked to review this book, after all, my knowledge of health care is limited to thankfully infrequent visits to my doctor. Moreover, I have a pet hate for articles that expect laymen like me to glean understanding from examples full of obtuse medical terminology. I mention this because I suspect many in the IR community will be similarly reticent about looking at this book. Well, let me put your minds at ease. The book indeed contains numerous medical examples, but, where they form an intrinsic part of the text, they are (almost) all explained in plain everyday language. As such, they are relevant and illuminating. The book is aimed squarely at the medical informatics community, but it is without doubt a valuable, readable and motivating introduction to IR in general, and hence deserves to be widely read. Modern medicine is a highly complex undertaking. Its practitioners, doctors, nurses, researchers and administrators, rely heavily on the availability of accurate up-to-date information. The decisions they make have very real, often life or death consequences. Medicine is thus, of necessity, a very practical discipline. Not surprising then, that it should turn wherever possible, to computerized systems to help manage an increasingly difficult task. Early chapters of the book set out to explain the problem faced by the medical profession and to introduce basic concepts including terminology and the origin and form of medical knowledge and the needs of its users. Hersh distinguishes two major forms of health care information; patient specific (individual patients' medical records including lab results, vital signs, reports, etc.) and knowledge-based (as found in medical research journals, and indexes and summaries thereof). The book is primarily concerned with retrieval of this latter type of information, although one chapter late in the book is devoted solely to the former type. This deals with the processing of the clinical narrative that, while utilizing many conventional IR methods described in preceding chapters, is particularly interesting because of its different goals and the special techniques developed to handle the very terse language for which busy doctors are infamous. The introductory chapters are followed by a detailed look at the evaluation of IR systems and an examination of some specific medical databases, in particular MEDLINE and other NLM (National Library of Medicine) information systems referred to throughout the remainder of the text. Health care systems must be seen …