This Article Full Text Full Text (PDF) All Versions of this Article: M1761v1 13/1/24    most recent Submit a response Alert me when this article is cited Alert me when eLetters are posted Alert me if a correction is posted Services Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in PubMed Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via HighWire Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Zeng, Q. T. Articles by Tse, T. Search for Related Content PubMed PubMed Citation Articles by Zeng, Q. T. Articles by Tse, T.

Exploring and Developing Consumer Health Vocabularies

Affiliations of the authors: Department of Radiology, Decision Systems Group, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA (QTZ); Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health and Human Services, Bethesda, MD (TT).

Correspondence and reprints: Qing T. Zeng, PhD, Department of Radiology, Decision Systems Group, Thorn 309, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, 75 Francis Street, Boston, MA 02115; e-mail: <qzeng{at}dsg.bwh.harvard.edu>.

Received for publication: 12/07/04; accepted for publication: 08/16/05.

Laypersons ("consumers") often have difficulty finding, understanding, and acting on health information due to gaps in their domain knowledge. Ideally, consumer health vocabularies (CHVs) would reflect the different ways consumers express and think about health topics, helping to bridge this vocabulary gap. However, despite the recent research on mismatches between consumer and professional language (e.g., lexical, semantic, and explanatory), there have been few systematic efforts to develop and evaluate CHVs. This paper presents the point of view that CHV development is practical and necessary for extending research on informatics-based tools to facilitate consumer health information seeking, retrieval, and understanding. In support of the view, we briefly describe a distributed, bottom-up approach for (1) exploring the relationship between common consumer health expressions and professional concepts and (2) developing an open-access, preliminary (draft) "first-generation" CHV. While recognizing the limitations of the approach (e.g., not addressing psychosocial and cultural factors), we suggest that such exploratory research and development will yield insights into the nature of consumer health expressions and assist developers in creating tools and applications to support consumer health information seeking.

This article has been cited by other articles:

				A. Keselman, A. C. Browne, and D. R. Kaufman Consumer Health Information Seeking as Hypothesis Testing J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc., July 1, 2008; 15(4): 484 - 495. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				A. Keselman, C. A. Smith, G. Divita, H. Kim, A. C. Browne, G. Leroy, and Q. Zeng-Treitler Consumer Health Concepts That Do Not Map to the UMLS: Where Do They Fit? J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc., July 1, 2008; 15(4): 496 - 505. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				A. Keselman, R. Logan, C. A. Smith, G. Leroy, and Q. Zeng-Treitler Developing Informatics Tools and Strategies for Consumer-centered Health Communication J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc., July 1, 2008; 15(4): 473 - 483. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				Q. Zeng-Treitler, S. Goryachev, T. Tse, A. Keselman, and A. Boxwala Estimating Consumer Familiarity with Health Terminology: A Context-based Approach J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc., May 1, 2008; 15(3): 349 - 356. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]