Increasing Patient Findability of Medical Research: Annotating Clinical Trials Using Standard Vocabularies

EDITOR'S SUMMARY

Multiple groups at Mayo Clinic organize knowledge with the aid of metadata for a variety of purposes. The ontology group focuses on consumer-oriented health information using several controlled vocabularies to support and coordinate care providers, consumers, clinical knowledge and, as part of its research management, information on clinical trials. Poor findability, inconsistent indexing and specialized language undermined the goal of increasing trial participation. The ontology group designed a metadata framework addressing disorders and procedures, investigational drugs and clinical departments, adopted and translated the clinical terminology of SNOMED CT and RxNorm vocabularies to consumer language and coordinated terminology with Mayo's Consumer Health Vocabulary. The result enables retrieval of clinical trial information from multiple access points including conditions, procedures, drug names, organizations involved and trial phase. The jump in inquiries since the search site was revised and vocabularies were modified show evidence of success.