Promoting electronic health record search through a time-aware approach

In this paper, we propose a time-aware approach to promoting textual retrieval performance for Electronic Health Record (EHR) search. The proposed approach focuses on identifying patients cohorts from the perspective of EHR temporal correlation. First, an EHR temporal profile is created according to EHR distribution on time interval for each patient. Second, the temporal similarity is computed and used as a feature for discovering temporal cohorts. In each cohort, the highest-ranked profile in textual retrieval is considered as the centroid, and a temporal relevance score is computed by multiplying temporal similarity with the textual relevance of the centroid. Finally, the temporal relevance is combined linearly with the textual relevance for re-ranking. Extensive experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in promoting retrieval performance for EHR search.