Representations of health concepts: a cognitive perspective

OBJECTIVE This paper studies the differences between controlled medical vocabularies that are designed as external artifacts and the mental concepts that are inside users' heads and used by users for reasoning, decision making, diagnosis, and treatment. DESIGN The major theories of concept representations developed in cognitive science were reviewed, analyzed, and compared with the major controlled medical vocabularies developed in medicine. RESULTS It was found that there are significant mismatches between controlled medical vocabularies that are designed as external artifacts and the mental concepts that are inside users' heads and used by users for reasoning, decision making, diagnosis, and treatment. CONCLUSIONS Controlled medical vocabularies should be designed with systematical considerations of the cognitive structures and processes of the users. Without such considerations, the designed vocabularies will not be appropriate for people because they are hard to use, although they may or may not be appropriate for machine processing.