Exploring Medical Expressions Used by Consumers and the Media - An Emerging View of Consumer Health Vocabularies - Learn how consumer terms map to professional medical vocabularies

Sep 28, 2026

Uploaded by noah

Study identifies and characterizes medical expressions, or terms, used by healthcare consumers and health mediators, and examines how well these lay terms align with professional medical vocabularies. Lay participants extracted about 100,000 term tokens from online forum discussions and print media, and the analysis of over 81,000 tokens shows that more than 75% map as synonyms or quasi-synonyms to UMLS. The work finds substantial conceptual overlap yet frequent differences in the surface forms of shared concepts, highlighting implications for bridging the medical vocabulary gap between consumers and professionals.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryHealthcare

FormatPDF

Pages5

Reading Time13 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Cross-boundary medical communication barriers

Prior work on consumer vocabulary problems

Methods

Vocabulary generation and corpus collection

Exploring Medical Expressions Used by Consumers and the Media: An Emerging View of Consumer Health Vocabularies Tony Tsea,b and Dagobert Soergela aCollege of Information Studies, University of Maryland, College Park bNational Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD Healthcare consumers often have difficulty expressing and understanding medical concepts. The goal of this study is to identify and characterize medical expressions or “terms”(linguistic forms and associated concepts) used by consumers and health mediators. In particular, these terms were characterized according to the degree to which they mapped to professional medical vocabularies. Lay participants identified approximately 100,000 term tokens from online discussion forum postings and print media articles. Of the over 81,000 extracted term tokens reviewed, more than 75% were mapped as synonyms or quasi-synonyms to the Unified Medical Language System® (UMLS®) Metathesaurus®. While 80% conceptual overlap was found between closely mapped lay (consumer and mediator) and technical (professional) medical terms, about half of these overlapping concepts contained lay forms different from technical forms. This study raises questions about the nature of consumer health vocabularies that we believe have theoretical and practical implications for bridging the medical vocabulary gap between consumers and professionals. INTRODUCTION As health consumers seek an active role in their own care, as informed life-style choices and prevention are promoted to improve personal health, and as public health concerns require increased epidemiological surveillance, including public awareness and vigilance, communication of medical information across the lay-professional boundary increases in volume and importance: • Health consumers need medical information and obtain it not only from their physicians but also through searching on the Web, through direct-toconsumer advertising, drug inserts, and patient education, mirroring a general trend towards enduser searching and end-user computing. • Physicians need to understand patients’ reports on their conditions (such as severity of pain, degree of discomfort), especially difficult in telemedicine or medicine otherwise mediated by technology. • Policy makers and health administrators need to collect data from the public and to alert them about medical issues, including natural and artificial health threats (e.g., SARS, monkeypox virus, bioterrorism) . In all these cross-boundary communications, terminology and understanding of medical concepts are serious barriers. Non-specialists often do not understand technical terms and explanations or interpret them differently, based on their personal and cultural experiences, education levels, and cognitive and affective states of mind [1] . Conversely, professionals and medical information systems may have difficulty in correctly interpreting lay health expressions and associated conceptualizations. Thus, research on how consumers express medical concepts provides insights that help bridge the terminology gap in bi-directional health-related communication between lay persons and professionals. Although the “consumer vocabulary problem” [2] has long been recognized,“personal health vocabularies have only recently been afforded importance in the literature…” [1:1485] . While terminologies for medical professionals continue to evolve, few consumer-level vocabularies have been explored ([3,4], for example) . As Lewis et al. observed,“The development of a consumer vocabulary should be based on research that includes consumer information needs and consumers’ ways of talking about and expressing those needs” [5:1530] . This suggestion parallels the trend towards user involvement in the development of better end-user systems. A goal of this study is to identify and characterize terms􀀁a form and its underlying concept􀀁used by two groups of non-specialists: (1) consumers and (2) health information

FAQs

What problem does the study address?

Healthcare consumers often struggle to express and understand medical concepts, while professionals may have difficulty interpreting lay health expressions. The study focuses on how consumer health vocabularies can bridge this terminology gap.

How were medical terms collected and analyzed?

The study collected term tokens from online health discussion forums and from print media. It then reviewed extracted tokens and evaluated how well they mapped to professional vocabularies, especially UMLS.

What mapping results were found between lay and professional terms?

More than 75% of reviewed term tokens mapped as synonyms or quasi-synonyms to UMLS. About 80% conceptual overlap was found for closely mapped lay and technical terms, but roughly half of overlapping concepts used lay forms different from technical forms.

Sep 28, 2026

Uploaded by noah