A General Model of Drug Prescription

Currently, there is no widely accepted structured representation of drug prescription. Nevertheless, a structured representation is required for entering and storing drug prescriptions avoiding free text in computerized systems, and for drug prescription reviews. Derived from part of the work of the European OPADE project, we describe an object-oriented model of drug prescription which incorporates important concepts such as the phase and triggering event concepts. This model can be used to record all drug prescriptions, including infusions, in a structured way avoiding free text. The phase concept allows the storage of sequentially ordered dosage regimens for a drug within the same prescription. The prescription triggering event concept allows recording of the administration of a drug conditional to dates, symptoms and clinical signs, medical procedures, and everyday life events. This model has been implemented within the OPADE project; the corresponding aspects of the user interface are presented to show how this model can be used in practice. Even if other new attributes may be added to the described objects, the structure of this model is suitable for general use in software which requires the entry, storage and processing of drug prescriptions.

Refining instructional text generation after evaluation

In this paper, we describe how user-adapted explanations about drug prescriptions can be generated from already existing data sources. We start by illustrating the two-step approach employed in the first version of the natural language generator and the limitations of generated texts, that we discovered through analytical and empirical evaluations. We claim that, although style refinement would be needed in these texts, particular care should be devoted to implementing some of the persuasion techniques that doctors employ in their explanations. This would require either thoroughly revising the text planning techniques employed or converting to a multistep generation architecture. We justify why we selected this second alternative and propose some heuristics to repair problems found in the first version of the generator. Some final considerations about the advantages of this approach and the possibility of generalizing it to other domains conclude the paper.

Generating recipient-centered explanations about drug prescription

In this paper we describe how we generated written explanations to 'indirect users' of a knowledge-based system in the domain of drug prescription. We call 'indirect users' the intended recipients of explanations, to distinguish them from the prescriber (the 'direct' user) who interacts with the system. The Explanation Generator was designed after several studies about indirect users' information needs and physicians' explanatory attitude in this domain. It integrates text planning techniques with ATN-based surface generation. A double modeling component enables adapting the information content, order and style to the indirect user to whom explanation is addressed. Several examples of computer-generated texts are provided, and they are contrasted with the physicians' explanations to discuss advantages and limits of the approach adopted.

A general model of drug prescription

Currently, there is no widely accepted structured representation of drug prescription. Nevertheless, a structured representation is required for entering and storing drug prescriptions avoiding free text in computerized systems, and for drug prescription reviews. Derived from part of the work of the European OPADE project, we describe an object-oriented model of drug prescription which incorporates important concepts such as the phase and triggering event concepts. This model can be used to record all drug prescriptions, including infusions, in a structured way avoiding free text. The phase concept allows the storage of sequentially ordered dosage regimens for a drug within the same prescription. The prescription triggering event concept allows recording of the administration of a drug conditional to dates, symptoms and clinical signs, medical procedures, and everyday life events. This model has been implemented within the OPADE project; the corresponding aspects of the user interface are presented to show how this model can be used in practice. Even if other new attributes may be added to the described objects, the structure of this model is suitable for general use in software which requires the entry, storage and processing of drug prescriptions.