Automatic Acquisition of Knowledge for Senior Care Planning

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Dramatic growth of the senior population in the U.S. is widely expected to challenge the capacity of this segment of the U.S. health system. Alternative strategies to support seniors living independently will be critical in meeting the short fall. My Health Care Manager (MHCM) has developed the Senior Care Navigation System (SCANSTM) to provide decision support to Geriatric Care Managers (GCMs), registered nurses and social workers, in the construction of consumer-side care plans for seniors and their caregivers. SCANSTM provides interventions and practical, real-world tools to extend the healthy and active years of life and assist families with critical decisions. Automatic acquisition of knowledge will help to augment MHCM's research staff in order to keep the SCANSTM knowledge base up to date for providing effective and efficient senior care plans. The overall goal for this Fast-Track SBIR research will be for MHCM in collaboration with the Indiana University's School of Informatics to develop an automated knowledge acquisition system that will acquire knowledge from health literature pertinent to senior care. This knowledge in the form of "best practices" will be used as part of the SCANSTM decision support system. The automatic acquisition of knowledge will greatly increase the overall productivity of the SCANS Research Team. The improvements in quality, timeliness, breadth, depth, and volume of research will be a marketable feature of the SCANSTM product. During Phase I, MHCM will validate the feasibility of automatically acquiring knowledge in literature for senior care planning. MHCM will develop knowledge extraction methodologies for geriatric care in Phase I and will implement 3 of 40 MHCM defined care categories. Phase II will expand on the algorithm(s) developed during Phase I to include an additional 30-37 care categories. MCHM will also develop geriatric care intervention discovery algorithms to be used in finding, updating, and evaluating new knowledge to be included in the SCANSTM knowledgebase. MHCM will verify and validate the feasibility of the knowledge acquisition methods by comparing the current manual research process with an automated acquisition process using literature. MHCM will then augment the knowledge discovered through text mining with an existing Bayesian Reasoning Network model to make the SCANS TM an efficient decision support system for geriatric care. With the completion of Phases I and II, commercialization of the knowledge acquisition system for SCANSTM can then proceed in Phase III of the project. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The goal of this Fast-Track research application is to improve the quality, depth and breadth of research reference material held in the Senior Care Navigation System, SCANS, knowledgebase used by our Geriatric Care Managers. The knowledgebase helps our GCM's to prepare comprehensive care plans for elders and their care givers covering 40 care categories. The intent is to expand the knowledge of and coordinate the services available to seniors and their families for improving their quality of life and for extending independent living.