Paper ID: 2308.03253

PaniniQA: Enhancing Patient Education Through Interactive Question Answering

Pengshan Cai, Zonghai Yao, Fei Liu, Dakuo Wang, Meghan Reilly, Huixue Zhou, Lingxi Li, Yi Cao, Alok Kapoor, Adarsha Bajracharya, Dan Berlowitz, Hong Yu

Patient portal allows discharged patients to access their personalized discharge instructions in electronic health records (EHRs). However, many patients have difficulty understanding or memorizing their discharge instructions. In this paper, we present PaniniQA, a patient-centric interactive question answering system designed to help patients understand their discharge instructions. PaniniQA first identifies important clinical content from patients' discharge instructions and then formulates patient-specific educational questions. In addition, PaniniQA is also equipped with answer verification functionality to provide timely feedback to correct patients' misunderstandings. Our comprehensive automatic and human evaluation results demonstrate our PaniniQA is capable of improving patients' mastery of their medical instructions through effective interactions

Submitted: Aug 7, 2023