Abstract
Patient descriptors, or “problems,” such as “brain metastases of melanoma” are an
effective way for caregivers to describe patients. But most problems, e.g., “cubital
tunnel syndrome” or “ulnar nerve compression,” found in problem lists in an Electronic
Medical Record (EMR) are not comparable computationally – in general, a computer cannot
determine whether they describe the same or a related problem, or whether the user
would have preferred “ulnar nerve compression syndrome.” Metaphrase is a scalable,
middleware component designed to be accessed from problemmanager applications in EMR
systems. In response to caregivers' informal descriptors it suggests potentially equivalent,
authoritative, and more formally comparable descriptors. Metaphrase contains a clinical
subset of the 1997 UMLS Metathesaurus and some 10,000 “problems” from the Mayo Clinic
and Harvard Beth Israel Hospital. Word and term completion, spelling correction, and
semantic navigation, all combine to ease the burden of problem conceptualization,
entry and formalization.
Keywords
Computer-based Patient Records - Problem Lists - Formalization - Unified Medical Language
System - Semantic Navigation
