SemLink — Dynamic generation of hyperlinks to enhance patient readability of discharge summaries

Discharge Summaries contains vocabulary that is difficult to understand for consumers. We used semantic annotation in SemLink to dynamically generate synonyms and hyperlinks to appropriate Internet resources for difficult terms in discharge summary text to make the text more comprehensible to consumers. This paper describes our semantic annotation approach and evaluates our automatic hyperlink generation algorithm in terms of success in locating web pages to hyperlink for difficult terms in the Clinical Management sections of a corpus of 200 discharge summary texts. The system achieved 95% success in hyperlinking topically relevant web resources to the difficult terms; 83% of the hyperlinks could be restricted to resources of reading grade-level 8 or less with no reduction in relevance. In the context of discharge summaries we find automated hyperlinking to provide a good level of performance in leveraging openly available resources to aid consumer interpretation of difficult terms.