Authoring and generation of individualized patient education materials.

Although the pre-surgical patient-surgeon encounter is the opportunity to educate the patient, it is essential that the patient be given educational materials to complement the face-to-face exchange. This is virtu-ally impossible to do well with brochures, because many combinations of procedures are possible, dif-ferent patients have different concerns, and patients have varying levels of literacy and knowledge. In the extreme, a patient would either be given a set of bro-chures selected from 100s of variants, or all patients would be given the same set of brochures without regard for differing needs. We have been developing an information brochure generator that customizes material for every individual patient regardless of the complexity of the surgical intervention.