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The quality of health care depends, among other factors, on the quality of a physician's domain knowledge. Since it is impossible to keep up with all new findings and developments, physicians usually have gaps in their domain knowledge. To handle exceptional cases, access to the full range of medical literature is required. The specific literature needed for appropriate treatment of the patient is described by a physician's information need. Physicians are often unaware of their information needs. To support them, this paper presents a first step towards automatically formulating patient-related information needs. We start investigating how we can model a physician's information needs in general. Then we propose an approach to instantiate the model into a representation of a physician's information needs using the patient data as stored in a medical record. Our experiments show that this approach is feasible. Since the number of formulated patient-related information needs is rather high, it has to be reduced. To reduce the number of formulated information needs we propose the use of additional knowledge. Four types of knowledge are discussed, viz. (a) knowledge about temporal aspects, (b) domain knowledge, (c) knowledge about a physician's specialism, and (d) a user model. Future research has to clarify which type of knowledge (or combination thereof) is most appropriate for our purpose. It is expected that the resultant set of information needs will have a manageable size and contributes to the quality of health care.

The retrieval of patient-related literature is hampered by the large size of medical literature. Various computer systems have been developed to assist physicians during information retrieval. However, in general, physicians lack the time and skills required to employ such systems effectively. Our goal is to investigate to what extent a physician can be provided with patient-related literature without spending extra time and without acquiring additional skills. In previous research we developed a method to formulate a physician's patient-related information needs automatically, without requiring any interaction between the physician and the system. The formulated information needs can be used as a starting point for literature retrieval. As a result we found that the number of information needs formulated per physician was quite high and had to be reduced to avoid a literature overload. In this paper we present four types of knowledge that may be used to accomplish a reduction in the number of information needs. The usefulness of each of these knowledge types depends heavily on the specific cause underlying the multitude of information needs. To determine the nature of the cause, we performed an experimental analysis. The results of the analysis led us to conclude that the knowledge types can be ordered according to their appropriateness as follows: (1) knowledge concerning temporal aspects, (2) knowledge concerning a physician's specialism, (3) domain knowledge, and (4) a user model. Further research has to be performed, in particular on precisely assessing the performance of each type of knowledge within our domain.