Use of consumer health vocabularies in online physician directory to improve physician search.
There is a language gap between health care providers and consumers, which is a substantial barrier to access health information for consumers. Unlike doctors who tend to use formal medical terms to describe health-related concepts, consumers use more simple words or "everyday language" to express those concepts. We compared the health care emphasis terms entered by providers on the HealthLink online physician directory with the search terms entered by consumers in the year of 2006 to sort out the different ways between professional and lay expressions to describe health-related concepts. By adding more consumer-oriented terms selected from HealthLink log files and UMLS Metathesaurus to the current system, we are developing our own consumer health vocabulary to improve physician search.
Hong
Yi
Y
Office of Clinical Informatics, Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, WI, 53226, USA.
Gillis
Rick D
RD
Donnell
Robert F
RF
D032882:Comprehension; D054626:Consumer Health Information / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D004018:Dictionaries, Medical as Topic; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D057386:Search Engine / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D017432:Unified Medical Language System; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled; D014922:Wisconsin