Personalizing Patient Education Using Internet Health Resources and EPR Data: Pilot Evaluation of the STEPPS Prototype System

A core problem for health information seekers is locating relevant information among the vast amount of online content. Personalization has been suggested as a solution to effective Web information retrieval and also explored in the healthcare context, but then primarily with paper-based or locally available material. In this paper we report on the evaluation of a prototype system, STEPPS, which utilizes electronic patient record data to personalize the retrieval of health information from a variety of online resources, for the purposes of patient education. In a blinded clinician assessment of Web pages retrieved for 27 individual profiles of patients hospitalized in Dutch burn care units, STEPPS performed significantly better than random selection of material.