Evaluation of Alternative Formats For Computer-Generated Medical Case Reports

While there have been a number of studies of human-computer interaction through screens, there has been very little research on appropriate formats for presenting information in hard-copy. Given the task of generating case reports for stroke patients from data in the National Stroke Data Bank, we decided to compare the effects of three different forms of presentation: a tabular format typical of other systems with computer output, a multi-paragraph text format as much like the discharge summaries written by physicians as possible, and the same text format with a topic heading above each paragraph.