Background: This paper presents a novel approach to searching electronic medical records that is based on concept matching rather than keyword matching.
Aim: The concept-based approach is intended to overcome specific challenges we identified in searching medical records.
Method: Queries and documents were transformed from their term-based originals into medical concepts as defined by the SNOMED-CT ontology.
Results: Evaluation on a real-world collection of medical records showed our concept-based approach outperformed a keyword baseline by 25% in Mean Average Precision.
Conclusion: The concept-based approach provides a framework for further development of inference based search systems for dealing with medical data.
Keywords: Electronic medical records; Health informatics.; Information retrieval; Semantic search and inference.