A Hybrid Methodology for Consumer-oriented Healthcare Knowledge Acquisition

In spite of the improvements in Healthcare Informatics in answering consumer needs, it is still difficult for laypersons who do not have a good level of healthcare literacy, to find, understand, and act on health information. This is due to the communication gap which still persists 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. Following this direction, this work suggests a hybrid 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 provide translation, search, and classification services, helping users to improve access 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 methodology of acquisition provided many “lay” terms that can be considered good synonyms for medical concepts.