A Hybrid Methodology for Consumer-Oriented Healthcare Knowledge Acquisition

In Consumer Healthcare Informatics it is still difficult for laypersons to find, understand and act on health information, due to the persistent communication gap between specialized medical terminology and "lay" medical terminology used by healthcare consumers. Furthermore, existing clinically-oriented terminologies cannot provide sufficient support when integrated into consumer-oriented applications, so there is a need to create consumer-friendly terminologies reflecting the different ways healthcare consumers express and think about health topics. This work suggests a methodology to acquire consumer health terminology for creating a Consumer-oriented Medical Vocabulary for Italian that mitigates this gap. This resource, aligned to a standard medical terminology, could be useful in Personal Health Records to improve users' accessibility to their healthcare data. We performed evaluation mapping on acquired data to the International Classification of Primary Care (ICPC-2) to find overlaps and the candidate "lay" terms that can be considered good synonyms for the medical ones.