Characteristics of consumer terminology for health information retrieval.
OBJECTIVE
As millions of consumers perform health information retrieval online, the mismatch between their terminology and the terminologies of the information sources could become a major barrier to successful retrievals. To address this problem, we studied the characteristics of consumer terminology for health information retrieval.


METHODS
Our study focused on consumer queries that were used on a consumer health service Web site and a consumer health information Web site. We analyzed data from the site-usage logs and conducted interviews with patients.


RESULTS
Our findings show that consumers' information retrieval performance is very poor. There are significant mismatches at all levels (lexical, semantic and mental models) between the consumer terminology and both the information source terminology and standard medical vocabularies.


CONCLUSIONS
Comprehensive terminology support on all levels is needed for consumer health information retrieval.
Zeng
Q
Q
Decision Systems Group, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA. qzeng@dsg.bwh.harvard.edu
Kogan
S
S
Ash
N
N
Greenes
R A
RA
Boxwala
A A
AA
D000328:Adult; D003258:Consumer Behavior / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000592:standards*; D020407:Internet; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D017432:Unified Medical Language System / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*