Semantic modeling of healthcare guidelines to support health literacy and patient engagement

Abstract

Developing new methods and solutions of personalized medicine can address manycurrent sosio-economical challenges both locally and globally. The investments made to supporthealth can help people to have an independent, productive and happy life. To motivate thedevelopment of new patient support tools we illustrate the need for better health literacy and patientengagement, some common frameworks for modeling medical knowledge and some ways tosupport patients with online health queries and shared decision making. Then we provide someexperimental results we have generated by semantic analysis about healthcare guidelines offered byThe Finnish Medical Society Duodecim containing 85 055 words so that we created a conceptualnetwork of 57 679 unique conceptual links traversed with 200 000 link steps. We suggest that ourapproach to semantic modeling of medical knowledge can be modularly applied to develop variedcomputational solutions for personalized medicine and health informatics.Peer reviewe