A methodology for knowledge acquisition in consumer-oriented healthcare

Abstract

In Consumer-oriented Healthcare Informatics it is still difficult for laypersons to find, understand, and act on health information. This is due to the communication gap between specialized medical terminology used by healthcare professionals and "lay" medical terminology used by healthcare consumers. So there is a need to create consumer-friendly terminologies reflecting the different ways consumers and patients express and think about health topics. An additional need is to map these terminologies with existing clinically-oriented terminologies. This work suggests a methodology to acquire consumer health terminology for creating a Consumer-oriented Medical Vocabulary for Italian that mitigates this gap. This resource could be used in Personal Health Records to improve users' accessibility to their healthcare data. In order to evaluate this methodology we mapped "lay" terms with standard specialized terminologies to find overlaps. Results showed that our approach provided many "lay" terms that can be considered good synonyms for medical concepts. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.