Development and Practical Use of a Medical Vocabulary-Thesaurus-Dictionary for Patient Empowerment

Abstract

Health empowerment can be obtained through an informative and educational intervention to increase one's ability to think critically and act autonomously. Medical texts are usually written by professionals and can be difficulty understood by non experts who do not have the same skills and vocabularies. Thus, it would be desirable to have an online medical vocabulary-thesaurus-dictionary that can help a non expert to easily find the consumer equivalent of medical (technical) terms and additional consumer information. To this end, we have developed an online multilingual medical vocabulary-thesaurus-dictionary by interconnecting different online sources, i.e., medical vocabularies to create a list of technical terms, consumer health vocabularies (CHVs) for translating technical terms into their consumer equivalents and consumer dictionaries for finding explanations of the terms. In addition, we have built an online editor that allows to add new medical terms (with the related consumer information) and modify existing consumer terms and definitions. Furthermore, we have built some practical applications, on top of the medical vocabulary-thesaurus-dictionary, in order to facilitate the empowerment of patients, or non-experts in general. The applications are located at the data, information and knowledge levels of the 'knowledge pyramid' that, in our case, contains the empowerment at the top level.