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Methods Inf Med 2002; 41(04): 289-298
DOI: 10.1055/s-0038-1634490
Original article
Schattauer GmbH

Characteristics of Consumer Terminology for Health Information Retrieval

Q. Zeng
1   Decision Systems Group, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
,
S. Kogan
1   Decision Systems Group, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
,
N. Ash
1   Decision Systems Group, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
,
R. A. Greenes
1   Decision Systems Group, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
,
A. A. Boxwala
1   Decision Systems Group, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
› Author Affiliations
Further Information

Publication History

Received 11 August 2001

Accepted 25 March 2002

Publication Date:
07 February 2018 (online)

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Summary

Objectives: As millions of consumers perform health information retrieval online, the mismatch between their terminology and the terminologies of the information sources could become a major barrier to successful retrievals. To address this problem, we studied the characteristics of consumer terminology for health information retrieval.

Methods: Our study focused on consumer queries that were used on a consumer health service Web site and a consumer health information Web site. We analyzed data from the site-usage logs and conducted interviews with patients.

Results: Our findings show that consumers’ information retrieval performance is very poor. There are significant mismatches at all levels (lexical, semantic and mental models) between the consumer terminology and both the information source terminology and standard medical vocabularies.

Conclusions: Comprehensive terminology support on all levels is needed for consumer health information retrieval.

Keywords

Consumer health - medical vocabulary - information retrieval - query analysis
 

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