Natural Language Generation in Health Care Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association

Good communication is vital in health care, both among health care professionals, and between health care professionals and their patients. And well-written documents, describing and/or explaining the information in structured databases may be easier to comprehend, more edifying, and even more convincing than the structured data, even when presented in tabular or graphic form. Documents may be automatically generated from structured data, using techniques from the field of natural language generation. These techniques are concerned with how the content, organization and language used in a document can be dynamically selected, depending on the audience and context. They have been used to generate health education materials, explanations and critiques in decision support systems, and medical reports and progress notes. Effective communication is vital in health care, both between health care providers and their patients and among health care providers themselves. Different participants in the health care process--consultants, nurses, general practitioners, medical researchers, patients, their relatives, and even accountants and administrators--must all be able to obtain and communicate relevant information on patients and their treatment. But there are many obstacles in the way of effective communication: Participants may use different terms to describe the same thing--a particular problem for patients who do not understand medical terminology. Different participants frequently have different information needs and little time to filter information, so that no single report is truly adequate for all.