The testing of the automated Q&A system is ongoing and yesterday I thought we’d hit a major problem – a poor answer!

A quick historical detour: around 15–20 years ago, while running the NLH Q&A Service for the NHS in England, the wonderful Muir Gray (who funded the service) was keen to identify frequently asked questions. One that consistently came up was: “What is the optimal frequency of vitamin B12 injections in pernicious anaemia?”

Fast forward to today. I tested that same question on our current Q&A system – and the results were underwhelming. Thankfully, thanks to Rocio, we had a full testing trace, letting me follow every step in the process. This led me to the NICE guideline Vitamin B12 deficiency in over 16s: diagnosis and management, which states: “In this guideline, we do not use the term ‘pernicious anaemia’ to describe autoimmune gastritis.”

Curious, I emailed Chris (our medical director) to ask whether “pernicious anaemia” is now considered outdated. His reply? “Pernicious anaemia is old hat – only old fogies like us still use that term!”

So, back to the Q&A system, I did two things:

  • Re-asked the question using autoimmune gastritis instead of pernicious anaemia = great answer..
  • Updated our synonym mappings to treat both terms as equivalent in search.

What started as a concern about system performance turned into a valuable reminder of how medical language evolves – and that I’m getting old 🙂