Authors:
Marco Alfano
1
;
Biagio Lenzitti
2
;
Giosuè Lo Bosco
3
and
Valerio Perticone
2
Affiliations:
1
University of Palermo and Anghelos Centre on Communication Studies, Italy
;
2
University of Palermo, Italy
;
3
University of Palermo and Euro-Mediterranean Institute of Science and Technology, Italy
Keyword(s):
E-Health, Public Health, Healthcare Management Systems, Patient Empowerment, Plain Language, Consumer Health Vocabulary, Infobutton, Electronic Health Record, Personal Health Record.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Biomedical Engineering
;
Cloud Computing
;
Data Engineering
;
Design and Development Methodologies for Healthcare IT
;
e-Health
;
e-Health for Public Health
;
Electronic Health Records and Standards
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Health Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Knowledge Management
;
Ontologies and the Semantic Web
;
Platforms and Applications
;
Society, e-Business and e-Government
;
Web Information Systems and Technologies
Abstract:
Medical texts (reports, articles, etc.) are usually written by professionals (physicians, medical researchers,
etc.) who use their own language and communication style. On the other hand, these texts are often read by
health consumers (as in the case of medical reports) who do not have the same skills and vocabularies of the
experts and can have difficulties in text comprehension. To help a health consumer in understanding a
medical text, it would be desirable to have an automatic system that, given a text written with medical
(technical) terms, translates them in simple or plain language and provides additional information with the
same kind of language. We have designed such a system. It processes online medical documents and
provides health consumers with the needed information for their understanding. To this end, we use a
medical vocabulary for finding the technical terms in the medical texts, a consumer health vocabulary
(CHV) for translating the technical terms into their cons
umer equivalents and a health-consumer dictionary
for finding supplementary information on the terms. We have built a prototype that processes Italian
medical reports and uses infobuttons next to the technical terms for allowing easy retrieval of the desired
information.
(More)