A consumer health informatics (CHI) toolbox: challenges and implications.
Consumer health informatics (CHI) is a rapidly evolving sub-discipline of medical informatics. Such developing fields typically share common needs, such as harmonizing terms and building a common foundation of research methods and instruments. The authors describe a pilot study to conceptualize and develop a "CHI toolbox," a repository of existing methods and instruments across relevant established fields. The challenges encountered in attempting to organize concepts in a nascent, interdisciplinary field are discussed. The authors' experiences in creating a comprehensive CHI toolbox suggest that a larger, concerted effort to develop a similar product by members of the relevant research communities could accelerate the development of common terms, operational definitions, variables, and instruments within the CHI field.
Bakker
Theodora A
TA
Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, National Library of Medicine, NIH, DHHS, Bethesda, MD, USA.
Ryce
Andrea N
AN
Logan
Robert A
RA
Tse
Tony
T
Hutcherson
Lidia
L
D006262:Health; D006302:Health Services Research; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D008490:Medical Informatics / Q000592:standards*; D010865:Pilot Projects; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled