  Patient portal allows discharged patients to access their personalized
discharge instructions in electronic health records (EHRs). However, many
patients have difficulty understanding or memorizing their discharge
instructions. In this paper, we present PaniniQA, a patient-centric interactive
question answering system designed to help patients understand their discharge
instructions. PaniniQA first identifies important clinical content from
patients' discharge instructions and then formulates patient-specific
educational questions. In addition, PaniniQA is also equipped with answer
verification functionality to provide timely feedback to correct patients'
misunderstandings. Our comprehensive automatic and human evaluation results
demonstrate our PaniniQA is capable of improving patients' mastery of their
medical instructions through effective interactions
