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Anna Harbourt first contacted Medical Informatics in graduate school, at the University of Missouri-Columbia (UMC), where she worked as a research assistant for Dr. Joyce Mitchell, Director of the Medical Informatics Group of UMC's School of Medicine. Dr. Mitchell's research involved studying end-user search behavior of MEDLINE via Grateful Med.
Ms. Harbourt received a B.A. in Library Science in 1989 and an M.A. in Library Science in 1990 from UMC. She was an NLM associate intern in 1991-92 during which she worked on the Coach Expert Search Refinement System as one of her research projects. Ms. Harbourt subsequently joined the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications (LHNCBC) in 1992, where she continues her work on the Coach Expert Search Refinement System, and the Coach Metathesaurus Browser, along with Mr. Edmund Syed, under the direction of Dr. Lawrence C. Kingsland, III, Chief of the Computer Science Branch of LHNCBC.
The Coach Expert Search Refinement System invokes the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus and other knowledge sources to help users of the Grateful Med front end program improve retrieval from MEDLINE. The Coach System works interactively with the user, with Grateful Med, with its knowledge sources and with ELHILL.