Reference: Musen, M. A.; Wieckert, K. E.; Miller, E. T.; Campbell, K. E.; & Fagan, L. M. Development of a Controlled Medical Terminology: Knowledge Acquisition and Knowledge Representation. April, 1994.
Abstract: The creation of controlled medical terminologies is a central challenge in the development of electronic patient records. In the T-Helper patient-record system, which has been designed for the care of patients with HIV infection, a module known as IVORY allows health-care workers to compose textual progress notes by making selections from menus that the system generates automatically from a controlled medical terminology. Construction of the IVORY vocabulary has required extensive design sessions with a team of computer scientists and an expert physician. Refinement of the vocabulary was possible only when the design team could envision how the completed T-Helper system would be used in the context of clinical practice. Development of controlled medical terminologies is a problem in knowledge acquisition. Techniques used to acquire and represent clinical concepts for the purpose of building decision-support systems also are appropriate for the construction of controlled vocabularies such as the one in T-Helper.
Notes: Also appears in Proceedings of the IMIA Working Group 6 Conference on Natural Language Processing Updated April 1995.