Improving patient record search

Improving health search is a wide context which concerns the effectiveness of Information Retrieval (IR) systems (also called search engines) while providing grounds for the creation of reliable test collections. In this research we analyse IR and Text Processing methods to improve health search mainly that of Electronic Patient Records (EPR). We also propose a novel approach to evaluate IR systems, that unlike traditional IR evaluation does not rely on human relevance judgement. We find that our meta-data based method is more effective than query expansion using external knowledge sources, and that our simulated relevance judgments have a positive correlation with man-made relevance judgements