a Decision Systems Group Brigham and Women’s Hospital

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 analyzed 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