TY - GEN
T1 - Clarifying diagnoses to laymen by employing the SNOMED CT hierarchy
AU - van Mens, Hugo J. Th.
AU - de Keizer, Nicolette F.
AU - Nienhuis, Remko
AU - Cornet, Ronald
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - Patient access to electronic health records (EHRs) is associated with improved efficiency, self-management, and patient engagement. However, the EHR contains medical language that can be difficult to comprehend by patients. In Dutch hospitals, the Diagnosethesaurus (DT) is used as an interface terminology to register diagnoses, but it does not contain patient-friendly terms. Fortunately, the DT is partly mapped to SNOMED CT and there is a proportionately small set of patient-friendly terms available in the Dutch SNOMED CT release. The purpose of this study was, therefore, to investigate if SNOMED CT can be used to generate clarifications of diagnoses for patients. Only 1.2% of the DT diagnoses that were already mapped to SNOMED CT had patient-friendly synonyms that were different from the diagnoses descriptions. However, by generalizing diagnoses to SNOMED CT concepts with patient-friendly terms, this number could be increased to 71%. In conclusion, we showed that a high percentage of diagnoses could be clarified to at least some extent with the relatively small set of patient-friendly terms. Future research will involve the further optimization of the clarifications, and evaluation with clinicians and patients.
AB - Patient access to electronic health records (EHRs) is associated with improved efficiency, self-management, and patient engagement. However, the EHR contains medical language that can be difficult to comprehend by patients. In Dutch hospitals, the Diagnosethesaurus (DT) is used as an interface terminology to register diagnoses, but it does not contain patient-friendly terms. Fortunately, the DT is partly mapped to SNOMED CT and there is a proportionately small set of patient-friendly terms available in the Dutch SNOMED CT release. The purpose of this study was, therefore, to investigate if SNOMED CT can be used to generate clarifications of diagnoses for patients. Only 1.2% of the DT diagnoses that were already mapped to SNOMED CT had patient-friendly synonyms that were different from the diagnoses descriptions. However, by generalizing diagnoses to SNOMED CT concepts with patient-friendly terms, this number could be increased to 71%. In conclusion, we showed that a high percentage of diagnoses could be clarified to at least some extent with the relatively small set of patient-friendly terms. Future research will involve the further optimization of the clarifications, and evaluation with clinicians and patients.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=85046531435&origin=inward
UR - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29678091
U2 - https://doi.org/10.3233/978-1-61499-852-5-900
DO - https://doi.org/10.3233/978-1-61499-852-5-900
M3 - Conference contribution
C2 - 29678091
VL - 247
T3 - Studies in Health Technology and Informatics
SP - 900
EP - 904
BT - Building Continents of Knowledge in Oceans of Data: The Future of Co-Created eHealth - Proceedings of MIE 2018
A2 - Klein, Gunnar O.
A2 - Karlsson, Daniel
A2 - Moen, Anne
A2 - Ugon, Adrien
PB - IOS Press
T2 - 40th Medical Informatics in Europe Conference, MIE 2018
Y2 - 24 April 2018 through 26 April 2018
ER -