Success lies in the details.

Library and Search Functionality for Medical Content

Industry
Healthcare

Project Size
Small

Problem
A healthcare software company needed the ability to aggregate, categorize and access multiple sources of third party content and access the content through its main patient facing application.

Solution
A stand-alone tool was developed that allowed medical librarians and nurses to categorize and aggregate all of the sources of the third party content. First, all of the third party content, including web pages, databases and files, was crawled and indexed using search engine technology. Once indexed, the content was categorized. The tool also handled medical news was derived from three news sources.

Software Features

• Crawl and index web pages, databases, and documents
• Create, edit, delete and move categories within the ISD-9 medical taxonomy
• Assign articles to one or more medical categories and topics
• Access the categories and associated articles via the web using a proprietary API

Technology
Java, Jobo, an open source gatherer/crawler; Lucene, an open source indexer; Applet using Swing; Oracle database

Challenges
Substantial planning and design were required to create a tool that appeared simple yet was flexible enough to provide users with the ability to use any taxonomy and manipulate the categories as they wanted.

Finding a low-cost search engine that would work across different content sources and had all of the functionality required a surprising amount of research.