Automatic Rewriting of Patient Record Narratives.

Patients require access to Electronic Patient Records, however medical language is often too difficult for patients to understand. Explaining records to patients is a time consuming task, which we attempt to simplify by automating the translation procedure. This paper introduces a research project dealing with the automatic rewriting of medical narratives for the benefit of patients. We are looking at various ways in which technical language can be transposed into patient-friendly language by means of a comparison with patient information materials. The text rewriting procedure we describe could potentially have an impact on the quality of information delivered to patients. We report on some preliminary experiments concerning rewriting at lexical and paragaph level. This is an ongoing project which currently addresses a restricted number of issues, including target text modelling and text rewriting at lexical level.