Enhancing Patient Safety through Human-Computer Information Retrieval on the Example of German-Speaking Surgical Reports

In view of the high number of deaths and complication rates of major surgical procedures worldwide, surgical safety is described as a substantial global public-health concern. Naturally, patient safety has become an international priority. The increasing amount of electronically available clinical documents holds great potential for the computational analysis of large repositories. However, most of this data is in textual form and the clinical domain is a challenging field for the appliance of natural language processing. This is particularly the case if you deal with a language other than English, due to the little attention from the international research community. In this project, we are concerned with the utilization of a Germanspeaking operative report repository for the purpose of risk management and patient safety research. In this particular paper we focus on the description of our information retrieval approach. We investigated the thought process of a domain expert in order to derive his information of interest and describe a facet-based way to navigate this kind of information in the form of extracted phrases. Initial results and feedback has been very promising, but a formal evaluation is still missing.