PaniniQA: Enhancing Patient Education Through Interactive Question Answering

Abstract

A 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 & human evaluation results demonstrate our PaniniQA is capable of improving patients' mastery of their medical instructions through effective interactions.

Publication
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Dakuo Wang
Dakuo Wang
Associate Professor

My research interests include human-computer interaction, human-AI collaboration, natural language processing, health informatics, data science, and computer-supported cooperative work.