  Tailored patient information (TPI) systems are computer programs which
produce personalised heath-information material for patients. TPI systems are
of growing interest to the natural-language generation (NLG) community; many
TPI systems have also been developed in the medical community, usually with
mail-merge technology. No matter what technology is used, experience shows that
it is not easy to field a TPI system, even if it is shown to be effective in
clinical trials. In this paper we discuss some of the difficulties in fielding
TPI systems. This is based on our experiences with 2 TPI systems, one for
generating asthma-information booklets and one for generating smoking-cessation
letters.
