9 research outputs found
How to interact with medical terminologies? Formative usability evaluations comparing three approaches for supporting the use of MedDRA by pharmacovigilance specialists
Background: Medical terminologies are commonly used in medicine. For instance, to answer a pharmacovigilance question, pharmacovigilance specialists (PVS) search in a pharmacovigilance database for reports in relation to a given drug. To do that, they first need to identify all MedDRA terms that might have been used to code an adverse reaction in the database, but terms may be numerous and difficult to select as they may belong to different parts of the hierarchy. In previous studies, three tools have been developed to help PVS identify and group all relevant MedDRA terms using three different approaches: forms, structured query-builder, and icons. Yet, a poor usability of the tools may increase PVS' workload and reduce their performance. This study aims to evaluate, compare and improve the three tools during two rounds of formative usability evaluation.
Methods: First, a cognitive walkthrough was performed. Based on the design recommendations obtained from this evaluation, designers made modifications to their tools to improve usability. Once this re-engineering phase completed, six PVS took part in a usability test: difficulties, errors and verbalizations during their interaction with the three tools were collected. Their satisfaction was measured through the System Usability Scale. The design recommendations issued from the tests were used to adapt the tools.
Results: All tools had usability problems related to the lack of guidance in the graphical user interface (e.g., unintuitive labels). In two tools, the use of the SNOMED CT to find MedDRA terms hampered their use because French PVS were not used to it. For the most obvious and common terms, the icons-based interface would appear to be more useful. For the less frequently used MedDRA terms or those distributed in different parts of the hierarchy, the structured query-builder would be preferable thanks to its great power and flexibility. The form-based tool seems to be a compromise.
Conclusion: These evaluations made it possible to identify the strengths of each tool but also their weaknesses to address them before further evaluation. Next step is to assess the acceptability of tools and the expressiveness of their results to help identify and group MedDRA terms
Medical Informatics
Information technology has been revolutionizing the everyday life of the common man, while medical science has been making rapid strides in understanding disease mechanisms, developing diagnostic techniques and effecting successful treatment regimen, even for those cases which would have been classified as a poor prognosis a decade earlier. The confluence of information technology and biomedicine has brought into its ambit additional dimensions of computerized databases for patient conditions, revolutionizing the way health care and patient information is recorded, processed, interpreted and utilized for improving the quality of life. This book consists of seven chapters dealing with the three primary issues of medical information acquisition from a patient's and health care professional's perspective, translational approaches from a researcher's point of view, and finally the application potential as required by the clinicians/physician. The book covers modern issues in Information Technology, Bioinformatics Methods and Clinical Applications. The chapters describe the basic process of acquisition of information in a health system, recent technological developments in biomedicine and the realistic evaluation of medical informatics
Front-Line Physicians' Satisfaction with Information Systems in Hospitals
Day-to-day operations management in hospital units is difficult due to continuously varying situations, several actors involved and a vast number of information systems in use. The aim of this study was to describe front-line physicians' satisfaction with existing information systems needed to support the day-to-day operations management in hospitals. A cross-sectional survey was used and data chosen with stratified random sampling were collected in nine hospitals. Data were analyzed with descriptive and inferential statistical methods. The response rate was 65 % (n = 111). The physicians reported that information systems support their decision making to some extent, but they do not improve access to information nor are they tailored for physicians. The respondents also reported that they need to use several information systems to support decision making and that they would prefer one information system to access important information. Improved information access would better support physicians' decision making and has the potential to improve the quality of decisions and speed up the decision making process.Peer reviewe
Towards a system of concepts for Family Medicine. Multilingual indexing in General Practice/ Family Medicine in the era of Semantic Web
UNIVERSITY OF LIÈGE, BELGIUM
Executive Summary
Faculty of Medicine
Département Universitaire de Médecine Générale.
Unité de recherche Soins Primaires et Santé
Doctor in biomedical sciences
Towards a system of concepts for Family Medicine.
Multilingual indexing in General Practice/ Family Medicine in the era
of SemanticWeb
by Dr. Marc JAMOULLE
Introduction
This thesis is about giving visibility to the often overlooked work of family
physicians and consequently, is about grey literature in General Practice
and Family Medicine (GP/FM). It often seems that conference organizers
do not think of GP/FM as a knowledge-producing discipline that deserves
active dissemination. A conference is organized, but not much is done with
the knowledge shared at these meetings. In turn, the knowledge cannot be
reused or reapplied. This these is also about indexing. To find knowledge
back, indexing is mandatory. We must prepare tools that will automatically
index the thousands of abstracts that family doctors produce each year in
various languages. And finally this work is about semantics1. It is an introduction
to health terminologies, ontologies, semantic data, and linked
open data. All are expressions of the next step: Semantic Web for health
care data. Concepts, units of thought expressed by terms, will be our target
and must have the ability to be expressed in multiple languages. In turn,
three areas of knowledge are at stake in this study: (i) Family Medicine as a
pillar of primary health care, (ii) computational linguistics, and (iii) health
information systems.
Aim
• To identify knowledge produced by General practitioners (GPs) by
improving annotation of grey literature in Primary Health Care
• To propose an experimental indexing system, acting as draft for a
standardized table of content of GP/GM
• To improve the searchability of repositories for grey literature in GP/GM.
1For specific terms, see the Glossary page 257
x
Methods
The first step aimed to design the taxonomy by identifying relevant concepts
in a compiled corpus of GP/FM texts. We have studied the concepts
identified in nearly two thousand communications of GPs during
conferences. The relevant concepts belong to the fields that are focusing
on GP/FM activities (e.g. teaching, ethics, management or environmental
hazard issues).
The second step was the development of an on-line, multilingual, terminological
resource for each category of the resulting taxonomy, named
Q-Codes. We have designed this terminology in the form of a lightweight
ontology, accessible on-line for readers and ready for use by computers of
the semantic web. It is also fit for the Linked Open Data universe.
Results
We propose 182 Q-Codes in an on-line multilingual database (10 languages)
(www.hetop.eu/Q) acting each as a filter for Medline. Q-Codes are also available
under the form of Unique Resource Identifiers (URIs) and are exportable
in Web Ontology Language (OWL). The International Classification of Primary
Care (ICPC) is linked to Q-Codes in order to form the Core Content
Classification in General Practice/Family Medicine (3CGP). So far, 3CGP is
in use by humans in pedagogy, in bibliographic studies, in indexing congresses,
master theses and other forms of grey literature in GP/FM. Use by
computers is experimented in automatic classifiers, annotators and natural
language processing.
Discussion
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to expand the ICPC
coding system with an extension for family physician contextual issues,
thus covering non-clinical content of practice. It remains to be proven that
our proposed terminology will help in dealing with more complex systems,
such as MeSH, to support information storage and retrieval activities.
However, this exercise is proposed as a first step in the creation of an ontology
of GP/FM and as an opening to the complex world of Semantic Web
technologies.
Conclusion
We expect that the creation of this terminological resource for indexing abstracts
and for facilitating Medline searches for general practitioners, researchers
and students in medicine will reduce loss of knowledge in the
domain of GP/FM. In addition, through better indexing of the grey literature
(congress abstracts, master’s and doctoral theses), we hope to enhance
the accessibility of research results and give visibility to the invisible work
of family physicians
Combining semantic and lexical methods for mapping MedDRA to VCM icons
International audienceVCM (Visualization of Concept in Medicine) is an iconic language that represents medical concepts, such as disorders, by icons. VCM has a formal semantics described by an ontology. The icons can be used in medical software for providing a visual summary or enriching texts. However, the use of VCM icons in user interfaces requires to map standard medical terminologies to VCM. Here, we present a method combining semantic and lexical approaches for mapping MedDRA to VCM. The method takes advantage of the hierarchical relations in MedDRA. It also analyzes the groups of lemmas in the term's labels, and relies on a manual mapping of these groups to the concepts in the VCM ontology. We evaluate the method on 50 terms. Finally, we discuss the method and suggest perspectives