title: Identifying consumer-friendly display (CFD) names for health concepts.
abstract: We have developed a systematic methodology using corpus-based text analysis followed by human review to assign "consumer-friendly display (CFD) names" to medical concepts from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus. Using NLM MedlinePlus queries as a corpus of consumer expressions and a collaborative Web-based tool to facilitate review, we analyzed 425 frequently occurring concepts. As a preliminary test of our method, we evaluated 34 ana-lyzed concepts and their CFD names, using a questionnaire modeled on standard reading assessments. The initial results that consumers (n=10) are more likely to understand and recognize CFD names than alternate labels suggest that the approach is useful in the development of consumer health vocabularies for displaying understandable health information.
authors.affiliation: DSG, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
authors.forename: Qing T
authors.initials: QT
authors.lastname: Zeng
authors.forename: Tony
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Tse
authors.forename: Jon
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Crowell
authors.forename: Guy
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Divita
authors.forename: Laura
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Roth
authors.forename: Allen C
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Browne
mesh_terms: D003256:Community Participation; D006801:Humans; D010361:Patients; D017432:Unified Medical Language System; D014825:Vocabulary