Medical Terminology Browsers - How Usable Are Them for Describing Clinical Archetypes?

Clinical terminologies are a major concern in medical informatics, as they are key to provide medical systems with higher levels of interoperability. Large terminologies as SNOMED CT are gaining presence in practical applications. In a related but different direction, archetypes or data type templates are becoming widespread as interchange mechanisms for medical information. Archetypes support mapping to terminologies, in a process that is typically done by the experts developing the archetype. It has been argued that terminology browsers are not appropriate for the task of helping clinical experts in the mapping process. This paper reports usability studies on two popular SNOMED CT browsers when used as tools for mapping archetypes. Empirical findings suggest that problems are due to the exposure of internal details of the terminology in the interfaces and the fact that they do not provide clear distinctions on the kinds of entities encoded in SNOMED CT.