title: Department of Veterans Affairs, University of Utah consortium participation in the NLM/AHCPR Large Scale Vocabulary Test.
abstract: The Large Scale Vocabulary Test (LSVT) was designed to evaluate how well the Metathesaurus plus planned additions to Meta covered the documentation needs of clinicians. Our consortium collected 10,538 clinical narratives from patient problem lists recorded at 65 Veterans Hospitals, internal medicine ambulatory care practices, diagnostic history and physical examination data elements from Iliad, and nursing shift notes and emergency transport patient records. The results showed 94% of submitted terms resulted in acceptable matches. 49% of submitted terms were judged to be synonymous with the match terms, 35% were judged to be more specific (usually due to modifiers), 2%, were less specific, and 6% had an associative relationship. In 8% of cases either no match was found by the LSVT interface or all proposed matches were rejected by the raters. The LSVT content was quite suitable for coding our narratives. Necessary improvements for an electronic record would include the ability to compose modifiers together with root concepts.
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Informatics, Veterans Affairs IRMFO, VA Medical Center, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA.
authors.forename: J C
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Eagon
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Ortiz
authors.forename: K A
authors.initials: KA
authors.lastname: Zollo
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Hurdle
authors.forename: M J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Lincoln
mesh_terms: D000553:Ambulatory Care; D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D005103:Expert Systems; D006787:Hospitals, Veterans; D008499:Medical Records / Q000145:classification*; D008501:Medical Records, Problem-Oriented; D009737:Nursing Records; D017432:Unified Medical Language System; D014481:United States; D014493:United States Department of Veterans Affairs; D014495:Universities; D014589:Utah; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled