Terminology in Written Medical Reports: A Proposal of Text Enrichment to Favour its Comprehension by the Patient

Abstract

The empowerment of the population and the democratisation of information regarding healthcare have revealed that there is a communication gap between health professionals and patients. The latter are constantly receiving more and more written information about their healthcare visits and treatments, but that does not mean they understand it. In this paper we focus on the patient’s lack of comprehension of medical reports. After linguistically characterising the medical report, we present the results of a survey that showed that patients have serious comprehension difficulties concerning the medical reports they receive, specifically problems regarding the medical terminology used in these texts, specifically in Spanish and Catalan. To favour the understanding of medical reports, we propose an automatic text enrichment strategy that generates linguistically and cognitively enriched medical reports which are more comprehensible to the patient, and which focus on the parts of the medical report that most interest the patient: the diagnosis and treatment sections.

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