Background: The medical information in the internet especially the World Wide Web, is escalating at a tremendous rate. This has made a substantial amount of health information available to the public and healthcare professionals alike through internet. Thus Health information retrieval (HIR) has become a very important part of medical informatics. Due to the same reason there has been many approaches tried for health information retrieval. This paper analysis such approaches currently used.
Method: A literature review was performed in order to obtained research articles indicating the various health information retrieval methods. The databases that were searched included Medline, Meditext, Ebscohost, and Science direct. Keywords such as " health informatics, health information, health information retrieval" were used in combination with the truncations such as 'AND'&'OR' wherever necessary.
Findings: With a thorough literature review it is seen that providing information indiscriminately to the clinicians is more likely to impair decision making rather than to enhance it. Quality of information acquired from patient-related literature is vital to the quality of care provided. The health care providers do have questions during their clinical care activities and seek internet for information but if the quality of the information retrieved is not good these questions go unanswered, even when the answers are available. These may have serious consequences on the outcome of the patients.
Improvements: The development of new HIR approaches and Unified Medical Language System are not only simplifying the process of HIR but also giving quality information in a short time. The future trend of HIR systems are towards a balance between their user friendliness and quality of information retrieved. Thus in conclusion it could be said that along with the development of HIR system it is very essential to build a good, strong, secure privacy and confidentiality policy to protect the vast data stored electronically from misuse.