A Consumer Lexicons Connecter for the Domains of Medical Specialties

Healthcare is a complex environment where the communication occurs among different actors, such as clinicians, doctors, nurses, and patients and their relatives. The communication deals with complex and interconnecting concepts and is often affected by uncertainty. Consequently, the sender should tailor the communication having in mind the receivers’ understanding abilities. In particular, the “vocabulary gap” between language familiar to both patients and consumers and terminology used in medical practice and research influences the effectiveness of health communication. In addition, low health literacy of patients leads to discrepancy in understanding medical concepts and affects therapy adherence, even more when patients are elders. However, applications for consumer health informatics (e.g. personal health records) are on the increase. So, to present health information and medical terms to consumers and patients in a comprehensible way becomes crucial. We designed and implemented a connecter of lexicons based on ontology-like taxonomic structures we developed. It is a software tool for carrying out the matching between the medical vocabulary of the doctor and that of the consumer. It relates on several domains of medical specialties within the family: “Pregnancy and the Newborn”, “Emergency care at home”, “Pediatrics”, “Geriatrics ward (for the outpatient)”, and “Hemato-oncology”. This education tool devoted to patients and consumers can help in bridging the “vocabulary gap” during patient-doctor interactions or communications.