PaniniQA: Enhancing Patient Education Through Interactive Question Answering

TL;DR

PaniniQA is an interactive question answering system that helps patients better understand and remember discharge instructions from electronic health records by generating personalized questions and providing immediate feedback.

Contribution

This paper introduces PaniniQA, a novel patient-centric system that automatically creates educational questions and verifies answers to enhance patient comprehension of discharge instructions.

Findings

Improves patient understanding of discharge instructions

Effective in correcting patient misunderstandings

Enhances patient engagement through interactive learning

Abstract

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