Wordify alternatives professional#

6, 7, 8, 9 In 2001, a distinguished panel at MEDINFO enumerated several significant challenges in creating a CHV and concluded: 5 While such studies consistently confirm that consumers have difficulty comprehending medical jargon, they do not provide a methodology for systematically identifying alternative words or phrases (collectively, “expressions”) that consumers are likely to use, recognize, and understand.Ĭoncerted informatics research on “consumer health vocabularies” (CHVs) began relatively recently. In the general biomedical literature, research on consumer understanding of medical words and concepts has focused primarily on lists of discrete terms in various specialties, e.g., 17 oncology terms, 3 six word pairs among emergency department patients, 4 and 50 “common” medical terms among surgical patients and family members. Further, technical terminology (or jargon) is a barrier to health literacy, defined as “the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions.” 1 Low health literacy has been associated with poor health outcomes (see ref. This vocabulary gap is becoming a more serious problem as consumers increasingly explore health-related information resources on their own and assume greater responsibility for personal health care. 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.Īlthough it has been long recognized that laypersons (“consumers”) and health care professionals express and think about health-related concepts differently, such mismatches in language continue to hinder effective communication, health information seeking, and, ultimately, informed decision making.

Wordify alternatives professional#

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. 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.

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. Ideally, consumer health vocabularies (CHVs) would reflect the different ways consumers express and think about health topics, helping to bridge this vocabulary gap.

Laypersons (“consumers”) often have difficulty finding, understanding, and acting on health information due to gaps in their domain knowledge.