title: Making texts in electronic health records comprehensible to consumers: a prototype translator.
abstract: Narrative reports from electronic health records are a major source of content for personal health records. We designed and implemented a prototype text translator to make these reports more comprehensible to consumers. The translator identifies difficult terms, replaces them with easier synonyms, and generates and inserts explanatory texts for them. In feasibility testing, the application was used to translate 9 clinical reports. Majority (68.8%) of text replacements and insertions were deemed correct and helpful by expert review. User evaluation demonstrated a non-statistically significant trend toward better comprehension when translation is provided (p=0.15).
authors.affiliation: Decision Systems Groups, Brigham and Women's Hospital,Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
authors.forename: Qing
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Zeng-Treitler
authors.forename: Sergey
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Goryachev
authors.forename: Hyeoneui
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Alla
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Keselman
authors.forename: Douglas
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Rosendale
mesh_terms: D032882:Comprehension; D054626:Consumer Health Information; D005240:Feasibility Studies; D006801:Humans; D008499:Medical Records; D016347:Medical Records Systems, Computerized; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D014175:Translating; D017432:Unified Medical Language System; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled