| [NOTE: pp. 2-3 - "Background and Motivation": Recent studies of the use of computer-based tools for consumer health information retrieval point to a mismatch between existing tools and the non-expert language used by most consumers - the language used not only by patients but also by family members, advisors, administrators, lawyers, and so forth, and to some degree also by nurses and physicians. (Slaughter, 2002), (C. A. Smith, et al., 2002), (Tse, 2003), (Tse and Soergel, 2003), (McCray and Tse, 2003), (Zeng, et al., in press). Where the usage of medical terms by professionals is at least in principle subject to control by standardization efforts, the highly contextually dependent usage of medical terms on the part of lay persons is much more difficult to capture in applications - and this in spite of the fact that it is in many ways simpler than expert usage. The taxonomies reflecting popular lexicalizations in all domains are indeed much less elaborate at both the upper and lower levels than in the corresponding technical lexica. (Medin and Atran, eds., 1999) Thus there are no popular terms linking infectious disease and mumps, so that in the popular medical taxonomy of diseases the former immediately subsumes the latter. The popular medical vocabulary naturally covers only a small segment of the encyclopedic vocabulary of medical professionalsm, and it lexicalizes mainly at the level of taxonomic orders. Popular medical terms (flu) are often fuzzier than technical medical terms. Many popular terms also cover a larger range of referent types than do technical terms; others may cover only part of the extension of their technical counterparts. We hypothesize, however, that with few exceptions the focal meanings (Berlin and Kay, 1969) of expert and non-expert terms will be identical. Constructing MFN and MBN allows us to test this and related hypotheses in a systematic way."] |
| [NOTE: Uses IMO Personal Health Terminology - "a medical lexicon containing both provider and patient descriptions for medical concepts. IMO PHT is mapped to several standard vocabularies including ICD-9, UMLS, MeSH and SNOMED(R)-CT." (p. 495).] |
| [NOTE: Slide #33 ("What site developers can do to overcome the findability barrier") 4th bullet: *Search engine on site - consumer health vocabulary mapped to professional vocabulary] |
| [NOTE: " I think we also have to look forward to the development of new technology. In my view, this will include in the area of linguistics, for example, a better-developed consumer health vocabulary."] |
| [NOTE: See Slides 15 ("Reference Slide 2 - Consumer Terminologies") and 16 ("Reference Slide 3 - a consumer terminology case study: WellMed's CHT")] |
| [Note: Discusses differences in mental models of consumer and professional language.] |
Lewis D, Brennan PF, McCray AT, Tuttle M, Bachman J. Panel: Representing Consumers Health Information Needs through Standardized Consumer Health Vocabularies: Issues and Implementations. Year? (MEDINFO 2001?) [download PDF]
| Under "Objective 4.1 - Further Medical Informatics Research" "Develop a consumer health terminology server to provide assistance to the increasing members of the general public who are users of NLM's Web-based systems, including spelling correction algorithms and investigation of multi-language interfaces." |
| [NOTE: "The Consumer Health Terminology (CHT) Thesaurus provides consumers with online access to more than one million medical phrases and terms. The CHT Thesaurus is derived from Lexical's Metaphrase(R) Thesauri on the Web: current developments and trends which in turn is based upon the UMLS1 Metathesaurus1, a compendium of controlled medical vocabularies maintained in part by Lexical under contract to the National Library of Medicine. The CHT Thesaurus contains approximately one million medical definitions, phrases and terms, which have been inter-related over the past ten years. The CHT Thesaurus is especially useful to consumers because it includes more than 14,000 WellMed-developed consumer and lay terms that are mapped into these other vocabularies. Using the CHT Thesaurus, search engines will be able to refine common search, providing users with the most appropriate information on the first try." (pp. 276-7)] |