title: A consumer health informatics (CHI) toolbox: challenges and implications.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, National Library of Medicine, NIH, DHHS, Bethesda, MD, USA.
authors.forename: Theodora A
authors.initials: TA
authors.lastname: Bakker
authors.forename: Andrea N
authors.initials: AN
authors.lastname: Ryce
authors.forename: Robert A
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Logan
authors.forename: Tony
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Tse
authors.forename: Lidia
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Hutcherson
mesh_terms: 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