An Interface Agent for Retrieval of Patient-Specific Cancer Information

PDQ and CANCERLIT are databases that represent potentially valuable resources for oncologists, but there are significant obstacles to their effective use in the clinical context. The clinician must learn where each database can be found, what it contains, and how to query it. More importantly, the clinician must also determine when and how each information resource is appropriate to the (clinical) task at hand, and integrate their general information with patient-specific data contained in patient records and clinical information systems. This research sought to remove these barriers to information use by developing a software agent in the human-computer interface that automates the information retrieval and integration process. The agent, developed from a cognitive model of how human experts perform these tasks, provides both a specific solution to the cancer information access problem, and a template for solving similar problems that occur with increasing frequency in many other domains.