A4 Refereed article in a conference publication
Vocabulary in Discharge Summaries – The Patients’ and the Nurses’ Perspective
Authors: Laippala V, Danielsson-Ojala R, Aantaa K, Lundgrén-Laine H, Salakoski T, Salanterä S.
Editors: Hanna Suominen
Publication year: 2013
Book title : Proceedings of the 4th International Louhi Workshop on Health Document Text Mining and Information Analysis (Louhi 2013)
Web address : http://nicta.com.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/37655/louhi2013_submission_6.pdf
Abstract
This paper studies medical discharge summaries’ vocabulary from the patients’ and nurses’ perspective. According to the Finnish law, these texts should be understandable to both of the groups and only contain commonly used terms and abbreviations. We found that even though the patients were sat-isfied with a lower level of understanding than the nurses, the medical terms, abbreviations and acronyms set barriers to both groups. The use of general lan-guage would help the patients and the nurses to better understand the texts and thus increase the patients’ means to participate in their care and prevent possi-ble misunderstandings between health care professionals. The analysis is two-fold and combines an extended morphological analysis on a corpus of 5,747,126 words and a content analysis of patients’ (n = 15) and nurses’ (n = 15) interviews.
This paper studies medical discharge summaries’ vocabulary from the patients’ and nurses’ perspective. According to the Finnish law, these texts should be understandable to both of the groups and only contain commonly used terms and abbreviations. We found that even though the patients were sat-isfied with a lower level of understanding than the nurses, the medical terms, abbreviations and acronyms set barriers to both groups. The use of general lan-guage would help the patients and the nurses to better understand the texts and thus increase the patients’ means to participate in their care and prevent possi-ble misunderstandings between health care professionals. The analysis is two-fold and combines an extended morphological analysis on a corpus of 5,747,126 words and a content analysis of patients’ (n = 15) and nurses’ (n = 15) interviews.
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