This course introduces students to the information needs of health professionals including the structure and characteristics of health information sources and their supporting databases. Special emphasis is placed on current indexing, classification and retrieval practice as well as on the design and evaluation of text-book based health information retrieval systems. Models of knowledge-based health information and state-of-the-art approaches to online content and retrieval methods are introduced. Issues related to the clinical narrative in medical records are also discussed including the problems in text processing, semantic pattern matching, clinical vocabularies, alternatives to natural language input of medical data, and future direction for clinical data capture and analysis. The course concludes with a discussion of research topics in automated indexing and retrieval, user interfaces and digital libraries as well as on the future integration of the various information systems in the health sciences.
Web-based: WebCT