As more health applications are developed to be consumer-oriented, health vocabularies that support such application are increasingly in demand. Research indicates both that there is a significant difference between consumer (layperson) health terminology and the terminology used by health care providers (professional jargon), and that half of all Americans have low health literacy levels. As a result, vocabularies and tools developed for health providers are inadequate to meet the needs of consumer health informatics. Consider the following examples from the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), the most comprehensive source of medical vocabularies. In each case the specific examples point to a more general failing in the broad spectrum of medical vocabularies: (a) common lay person terms such as """"""""belly button"""""""" and """"""""kneecap"""""""" are missing; (b) the term """"""""leg"""""""" is defined as the body part between the knee and the foot in UMLS, although it refers to the entire lower limb in lay language; (c) the terms """"""""Pes"""""""" and """"""""Kidney Calculi"""""""" are much less intelligible to lay persons than their synonyms """"""""foot"""""""" and """"""""Kidney stone"""""""", yet few vocabularies distinguish such arcane terms from their familiar synonyms; (d) terms such as """"""""flat head"""""""" or """"""""pes"""""""" are less effective query terms for consumer health content than their synonyms """"""""plagiocephaly"""""""" and """"""""foot,"""""""" because one is too """"""""lay"""""""" and the other too """"""""jargon,"""""""" - yet the UMLS offers the user no assistance in making such a judgment. We propose tackling these problems through further developing consumer health vocabulary (CHV) support. Based on our prior work, we identified one particular area within CHV research that has demonstrated great potential benefit and that differs from existing medical vocabulary research projects: the study of the effect that different forms (or """"""""terms"""""""" or """"""""names"""""""") of a concept have on the efficacy of consumer health applications. We propose to build on our previously funded CHV efforts, which centered on the automated mapping and linking of consumer terms to medical concepts for health information retrieval. The initial work of the proposed project will concentrate on improving consumer-term to health-concept mapping, and later work will give attention to the problem of selecting the best form of a concept for consumer health information comprehension and retrieval. ? ? ?

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Library of Medicine (NLM)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01LM007222-06
Application #
7392288
Study Section
Biomedical Library and Informatics Review Committee (BLR)
Program Officer
Sim, Hua-Chuan
Project Start
2002-01-15
Project End
2009-05-31
Budget Start
2008-04-01
Budget End
2009-05-31
Support Year
6
Fiscal Year
2008
Total Cost
$40,376
Indirect Cost
Name
Brigham and Women's Hospital
Department
Type
DUNS #
030811269
City
Boston
State
MA
Country
United States
Zip Code
02115
Kuang, Jinqiu; Argo, Lauren; Stoddard, Greg et al. (2015) Assessing Pictograph Recognition: A Comparison of Crowdsourcing and Traditional Survey Approaches. J Med Internet Res 17:e281
Bui, Duy; Nakamura, Carlos; Bray, Bruce E et al. (2012) Automated illustration of patients instructions. AMIA Annu Symp Proc 2012:1158-67
Kandula, Sasikiran; Ancker, Jessica S; Kaufman, David R et al. (2011) A new adaptive testing algorithm for shortening health literacy assessments. BMC Med Inform Decis Mak 11:52
Doing-Harris, Kristina M; Zeng-Treitler, Qing (2011) Computer-assisted update of a consumer health vocabulary through mining of social network data. J Med Internet Res 13:e37
Liao, Katherine P; Cai, Tianxi; Gainer, Vivian et al. (2010) Electronic medical records for discovery research in rheumatoid arthritis. Arthritis Care Res (Hoboken) 62:1120-7
Kandula, Sasikiran; Zeng-Treitler, Qing (2010) Exploring relations among semantic groups: a comparison of concept co-occurrence in biomedical sources. Stud Health Technol Inform 160:995-9
Clauson, Kevin A; Zeng-Treitler, Qing; Kandula, Sasikiran (2010) Readability of patient and health care professional targeted dietary supplement leaflets used for diabetes and chronic fatigue syndrome. J Altern Complement Med 16:119-24
Zeng-Treitler, Qing; Kim, Hyeoneui; Rosemblat, Graciela et al. (2010) Can multilingual machine translation help make medical record content more comprehensible to patients? Stud Health Technol Inform 160:73-7
Kim, Hyeoneui; Nakamura, Carlos; Zeng-Treitler, Qing (2009) Assessment of pictographs developed through a participatory design process using an online survey tool. J Med Internet Res 11:e5
Zeng-Treitler, Qing; Kim, Hyeoneui; Hunter, Martha (2008) Improving patient comprehension and recall of discharge instructions by supplementing free texts with pictographs. AMIA Annu Symp Proc :849-53

Showing the most recent 10 out of 29 publications