scholarly journals An Automatic Approach to Extending the Consumer Health Vocabulary

2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Michal Monselise ◽  
Jane Greenberg ◽  
Ou Stella Liang ◽  
Sonia Pascua ◽  
Heejun Kim ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Research Design ◽  
Hierarchical Structure ◽  
Medical Information ◽  
Research Effort ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Consumer Health ◽  
Medical Conditions ◽  
Medical Subject Headings ◽  
Ontology Structure ◽  
Single Entry

AbstractPurposeGiven the ubiquitous presence of the internet in our lives, many individuals turn to the web for medical information. A challenge here is that many laypersons (as “consumers”) do not use professional terms found in the medical nomenclature when describing their conditions and searching the internet. The Consumer Health Vocabulary (CHV) ontology, initially developed in 2007, aimed to bridge this gap, although updates have been limited over the last decade. The purpose of this research is to implement a means of automatically creating a hierarchical consumer health vocabulary. This overall purpose is improving consumers’ ability to search for medical conditions and symptoms with an enhanced CHV and improving the search capabilities of our searching and indexing tool HIVE (Helping Interdisciplinary Vocabulary Engineering).Design/methodology/approachThe research design uses ontological fusion, an approach for automatically extracting and integrating the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) ontology into CHV, and further convert CHV from a flat mapping to a hierarchical ontology. The additional relationships and parent terms from MeSH allow us to uncover relationships between existing terms in the CHV ontology as well. The research design also included improving the search capabilities of HIVE identifying alternate relationships and consolidating them to a single entry.FindingsThe key findings are an improved CHV with a hierarchical structure that enables consumers to search through the ontology and uncover more relationships.Research limitationsThere are some cases where the improved search results in HIVE return terms that are related but not completely synonymous. We present an example and discuss the implications of this result.Practical implicationsThis research makes available an updated and richer CHV ontology using the HIVE tool. Consumers may use this tool to search consumer terminology for medical conditions and symptoms. The HIVE tool will return results about the medical term linked with the consumer term as well as the hierarchy of other medical terms connected to the term.Originality/valueThis is a first attempt in over a decade to improve and enhance the CHV ontology with current terminology and the first research effort to convert CHV's original flat ontology structure to a hierarchical structure. This research also enhances the HIVE infrastructure and provides consumers with a simple, efficient mechanism for searching the CHV ontology and providing meaningful data to consumers.

scholarly journals Education and Consumer Informatics

2010 ◽  
Vol 19 (01) ◽  
pp. 72-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Boyer ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Health Information ◽  
Health Informatics ◽  
Medical Information ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Consumer Health ◽  
The Public ◽  
Nhs Direct ◽  
Consumer Informatics ◽  
Number Of Individuals

Summary Objectives: To evaluate the extent to which the Internet is accessed for health information and perceived as useful to varying groups classified primarily according to age. Method: Synopsis of the articles on education and consumer health informatics selected for the IMIA Yearbook of Medical Informatics 2010. Results: A growing number of individuals are actively seeking health information through a varying selection of resources. The Internet is now seen as a major source of health information alongside with books and other means of paper-based literature. However, it is not clear how the Internet is perceived by varied groups such as those coming from differing age groups. Conclusion: The papers selected attempt to obtain a better understanding about how the public perceives and uses the Internet as an information gathering tool—especially for health information. The papers also explore into how the Internet is used by different groups of people. As all online health information is not of uniform quality, it is important to access and rely on quality medical information. This issue is also dealt with, where the popularity of Wikipedia is measured with the popularity of reliable web sources such as Medline Plus and NHS Direct.

scholarly journals Cancer patients’ information seeking behavior related to online electronic healthcare records

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 146045822110247
Author(s):  
Hanife Rexhepi ◽  
Isto Huvila ◽  
Rose-Mharie Åhlfeldt ◽  
Åsa Cajander
Keyword(s):  
Cancer Patients ◽  
Health Information ◽  
Information Seeking ◽  
Healthcare Professionals ◽  
Medical Information ◽  
Information Seeking Behavior ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Seeking Behavior ◽  
Information Horizons ◽  
Health Information Sources

Patients’ online access to their EHR together with the rapid proliferation of medical information on the Internet has changed how patients use information to learn about their health. Patients’ tendency to turn to the Internet to find information about their health and care is well-documented. However, little is known about patients’ information seeking behavior when using online EHRs. By using information horizons as an analytical tool this paper aims to investigate the information behavior of cancer patients who have chosen to view their EHRs (readers) and to those who have not made that option (non-readers). Thirty interviews were conducted with patients. Based on information horizons, it seems that non-reading is associated with living in a narrower information world in comparison to readers. The findings do not suggest that the smallness would be a result of active avoidance of information, or that it would be counterproductive for the patients. The findings suggest, however, that EHRs would benefit from comprehensive linking to authoritative health information sources to help users to understand their contents. In parallel, healthcare professionals should be more aware of their personal role as a key source of health information to those who choose not to read their EHRs.

scholarly journals Medical Device Integration Model Based on the Internet of Things

2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 256-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aiyu Hao ◽  
Ling Wang
Keyword(s):  
Information System ◽  
Internet Of Things ◽  
Medical Device ◽  
Medical Devices ◽  
Medical Information ◽  
Medical Information System ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Model Based ◽  
Device Integration ◽  
The Internet Of Things

At present, hospitals in our country have basically established the HIS system, which manages registration, treatment, and charge, among many others, of patients. During treatment, patients need to use medical devices repeatedly to acquire all sorts of inspection data. Currently, the output data of the medical devices are often manually input into information system, which is easy to get wrong or easy to cause mismatches between inspection reports and patients. For some small hospitals of which information construction is still relatively weak, the information generated by the devices is still presented in the form of paper reports. When doctors or patients want to have access to the data at a given time again, they can only look at the paper files. Data integration between medical devices has long been a difficult problem for the medical information system, because the data from medical devices lack mandatory unified global standards and have outstanding heterogeneity of devices. In order to protect their own interests, manufacturers use special protocols, etc., thus causing medical devices to still be the "lonely island" of hospital information system. Besides, unfocused application of the data will lead to failure to achieve a reasonable distribution of medical resources. With the deepening of IT construction in hospitals, medical information systems will be bound to develop toward mobile applications, intelligent analysis, and interconnection and interworking, on the premise that there is an effective medical device integration (MDI) technology. To this end, this paper presents a MDI model based on the Internet of Things (IoT). Through abstract classification, this model is able to extract the common characteristics of the devices, resolve the heterogeneous differences between them, and employ a unified protocol to integrate data between devices. And by the IoT technology, it realizes interconnection network of devices and conducts associate matching between the data and the inspection with the terminal device in a timely manner.

402 The challenge of medical information on the internet: The experiences of Orphanet dedicated to the rare diseases and orphan drugs

1999 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. A56
Author(s):  
S. Aymé ◽  
D. Oziel ◽  
B. Urbero ◽  
E. Lecouturier ◽  
F. Reboul-Salze ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Rare Diseases ◽  
Medical Information ◽  
Orphan Drugs ◽  
The Internet

Evidence of an Open Government Data Portal Impact on the Public Sphere

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 21-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rui Pedro Lourenço
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Qualitative Content Analysis ◽  
Research Effort ◽  
Open Government ◽  
The Internet ◽  
The Public ◽  
Open Government Data ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Google Search ◽  
The Impact

Data portals are being created as part of open government strategies to increase transparency. But although the potential of the internet to increase transparency (as data disclosure) has been widely considered in the literature, there is no reported evidence of any of the released data actually being used by their ultimate recipients (citizens) for public accountability purposes. This descriptive research effort aims to find evidence of the impact of open government portals, asserting whether data is indeed being used and for what purposes. One contract portal was selected and Google Search was used to find portal references on the internet. A qualitative content analysis approach was adopted, whereby references were examined with respect to its main purpose and data usage. Evidence was found of contract data being used, among others, to identify possible situations of corruption, nepotism and misusage of public resources, support argumentation on public policy debates and, in general, to hold public officials accountable in the public sphere through ‘blame and shame' sanctions.

scholarly journals The Quality of Online Health-Related Information – an Emergent Consumer Health Issue

2016 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 408-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentin Nădăşan
Keyword(s):  
Evaluation Criteria ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Consumer Health ◽  
Related Information ◽  
Quality Health ◽  
Health Related ◽  
Potential Risks ◽  
Treatment Procedures ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThe Internet has become one of the main means of communication used by people who search for health-related information. The quality of online health-related information affects the users’ knowledge, their attitude, and their risk or health behaviour in complex ways and influences a substantial number of users in their decisions regarding diagnostic and treatment procedures.The aim of this review is to explore the benefits and risks associated with using the Internet as a source of health-related information; the relationship between the quality of the health-related information available on the Internet and the potential risks; the multiple conceptual components of the quality of health-related information; the evaluation criteria for quality health-related information; and the main approaches and initiatives that have been implemented worldwide to help improve users’ access to high-quality health-related information.

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