Involving healthcare consumers in knowledge acquisition for virtual healthcare

Knowledge acquisition (KA) is essential to creating effective virtual healthcare systems. KA is typically done with expert users such as clinicians and psychologists. In this paper, we describe knowledge acquisition activities which we carried out with healthcare consumers, in the context of a project to generate English summaries of medical data about babies in a neonatal intensive care unit. Working directly with consumers was in many ways more challenging than working with medical professionals, but it did lead to valuable insights which benefited our projects. We hope that the discussion of our experiences will help other researchers who wish to conduct KA with healthcare consumers.