Publications

A Semantic Search Engine for Helping Patients Find Doctors and Locations in a Large Healthcare Organization

Abstract

Efficiently finding doctors and locations (FDL) is an important search problem for patients in the healthcare domain, for which traditional information retrieval (IR) methods tend to be sub-optimal. This paper introduces and defines FDL as an important healthcare industry-specific problem in IR. We then propose a semantic search engine as a robust solution to FDL in Kaiser Permanente (KP), a large healthcare organization with 12 million members. Our solution meets practical needs of data security and privacy, scalability, cost-effectiveness, backward compatibility with existing indexes and search infrastructure, and interpretability of outputs for patients. It uses a concept-rich ontology to model raw data from multiple sources as entities, relations, and attributes in a knowledge graph that is stored and indexed in an industry-scale graph database. We evaluate the solution on a real patient-query log and demonstrate its …

Date
July 10, 2024
Authors
Mayank Kejriwal, Hamid Haidarian, Min-Hsueh Chiu, Andy Xiang, Deep Shrestha, Faizan Javed
Book
Proceedings of the 47th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
Pages
2945-2949