Maintaining a short term model of the users in a medical record management system

A patient folder management system should be the active supporting tool to the creation of the physician´s belief about the patient´s state of health, i.e. it has to be capable of retrieving and proposing the most appropriate and useful information to the user. Our target is to propose a new philosophy for a patient folder management system, capable of tailoring the information to the user´s belief, goal and knowledge about medical data. An essential precondition is that the system must permanently store the information on users in order to be able to exploit them. This paper describes research work on the design and creation of a medical folder management system of establishing cooperative dialogue with users who have access to the information contained therein. Particular attention has thus been paid to the problems of the maintenance of a short term model of the users which consult the medical folder management system and the related computational aspects. The physician´s work may be facilitated by a medical folder management system, not to be used passively for relevant data retrieval, but being capable of taking an active part in the construction of the mental picture which the physician constructs of the patient.