Vårdaktörsportalen (VAP) is a portal for health care providers made by Västra Götalandsregionen (VGR). This portal makes information from a number of reliable and authorised sources findable and accessible for the people who need it in their daily work. This stretches from doctors and nurses to medical secretaries primarily located in the region of Västra Götaland, Sweden. The site and most of its features and information is also accesible (in Swedish) to anyone through http://vap.vgregion.se. In November 2012 the first version of this site went live and Findwise had a big role in the creation of this search centric site. The main source of information for VAP is the regional guidelines found in a document repository within VGR but some other external sources are also included. These include trustworthy authorities like
- Socialstyrelsen
- Läkemedelsverket
- SBU
- TLV
- 1177 – the public health care information site for citizens
This search solution is built around the open source search engine Apache Solr and our common tools for processing and indexing. For this site we have also implemented a rather unique metadata enhancement service that automatically extracts keywords from the document to index and attaches it as metadata. The keyword extraction is based on information from the medical term database SweMeSH. More information (in Swedish) can be found on Google Code. We also include synonyms to keywords to increase recall, making it easier to find documents regardless of what synonym used.
The metadata enhancement service was included because the quality of metadata on the external sites was not very good. VGR will work with the above mentioned authorities to try and make them understand that they would benefit if they improved their data. The source 1177 stands out with very good meta data and overall good quality texts.
We have conducted a user study to see how this first version is able to satisfy user demands. The result of that study shows that some local sources are missing, but a general positive feedback on the idea and the graphical design was collected.
Findwise is looking forward to continue working on VAP with VGR in the future to make it an even better tool.
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