Evaluation of a Tool to Enhance Searching for Useful Medical Information on the Internet

Abstract

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) requires appropriate information to be available to clinicians at the point of care. Electronic sources of information may fulfill this need but require a high level of skill to use successfully. This chapter describes the rationale and initial testing of a system to allow collaborative searching and ontology construction for professional groups in the health sector. The approach is based around the use of a browser using a fuzzy ontology based on the National library of medicine (NLM) unified medical language system (UMLS). The results suggest that a tool that can assist users in finding information by recording their preferences and preferred meaning of text words can be usable by healthcare professionals. This approach may provide high-quality information for professionals in the future.