Summary
Objectives: This study aims to demonstrate the usability of discourse analyses as a means of
evaluating medical informatics systems by examining one particular computer-based
data-to-text system for delivering neonatal health care information.
Methods: Six textual summaries of clinical information, three produced by human clinicians
and three by the data-to-text system, were subjected to fine-grain discourse analysis.
Analysis was performed ‘blind’ on all six textual summaries. Analysis focused on the
identification of lexical items and on the potential effects of these items on users
of these clinical information summaries.
Results: Results showed that there were clear differences between human- and system-generated
clinical summaries, with human clinicians providing better narrative flow and textual
detail. The data-to-text system successfully produced textual summaries although it
fell short of human abilities.
Conclusions: These results indicate potential future improvements to the system. Discourse analysis
as used here may offer significant advantages in evaluating and developing similar
medical informatics systems.
Keywords
Medical informatics applications - user-computer interface - neonate - doctor-patient
relations - discourse analysis
