title: Metaphrase: an aid to the clinical conceptualization and formalization of patient problems in healthcare enterprises.
abstract: Patient descriptors, or "problems," such as "brain metastases of melanoma" are an effective way for caregivers to describe patients. But most problems, e.g., "cubital tunnel syndrome" or "ulnar nerve compression," found in problem lists in an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) are not comparable computationally--in general, a computer cannot determine whether they describe the same or a related problem, or whether the user would have preferred "ulnar nerve compression syndrome." Metaphrase is a scalable, middleware component designed to be accessed from problem-manager applications in EMR systems. In response to caregivers' informal descriptors it suggests potentially equivalent, authoritative, and more formally comparable descriptors. Metaphrase contains a clinical subset of the 1997 UMLS Metathesaurus and some 10,000 "problems" from the Mayo Clinic and Harvard Beth Israel Hospital. Word and term completion, spelling correction, and semantic navigation, all combine to ease the burden of problem conceptualization, entry and formalization.
authors.affiliation: Lexical Technology, Inc., Alameda, CA, USA. tuttle@lexical.com
authors.forename: M S
authors.initials: MS
authors.lastname: Tuttle
authors.forename: N E
authors.initials: NE
authors.lastname: Olson
authors.forename: K D
authors.initials: KD
authors.lastname: Keck
authors.forename: W G
authors.initials: WG
authors.lastname: Cole
authors.forename: M S
authors.initials: MS
authors.lastname: Erlbaum
authors.forename: D D
authors.initials: DD
authors.lastname: Sherertz
authors.forename: C G
authors.initials: CG
authors.lastname: Chute
authors.forename: P L
authors.initials: PL
authors.lastname: Elkin
authors.forename: G E
authors.initials: GE
authors.lastname: Atkin
authors.forename: B H
authors.initials: BH
authors.lastname: Kaihoi
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Safran
authors.forename: D
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Rind
authors.forename: V
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Law
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D008492:Medical Informatics Computing; D016347:Medical Records Systems, Computerized; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D012660:Semantics; D012985:Software Design; D017432:Unified Medical Language System