Diagnostic follow-up to consultant physicians by computer feedback.

A computer follow-up system has been developed which automatically prepares follow-up summaries for consultant physicians. This makes it possible to provide reliable feedback of diagnostic information in place of the traditional but haphazard word-of-mouth process. This system has been tested initially for surgical and autopsy-pathology follow-up of neuroradiology and nuclear medicine consultations using report conclusions available from the UCLA Natural Language Information Storage and Retrieval System.