Status of Health Information Classification for Consumer Information Retrieval

With a growing movement toward patient-centric health care and patient empowerment, consumers are encouraged to take an active role in their health care. In fact, nearly 80% of Americans are taking to the Internet to search for health information (Fox, 2006). In addition to the Internet, consumers have access to a growing number of health search engines and professional biomedical databases via health science libraries. However, the consumer’s ability to efficiently retrieve information that is understandable and pertinent to their query is hindered (Volk, 2007) for reasons that include inexperience with “technical terminology,” (Zeng & Tse, 2006) and poor database usability (Smith, 2007). Several organizations are engaged in efforts to refine capabilities to match consumer health queries with accurate information (Smith, 2007; Zeng & Tse, 2006; Zeng et al., 2006). However, as more consumers seek health information in this growing empowered climate and more information is made available, there is an increasing danger that the consumer will become more confused and less able to find pertinent information. This paper explores three areas: it examines the current biomedical ontologies that are used for consumer health searches; it looks at the current means for health information retrieval (IR); and it explores ongoing projects that serve to improve consumer search capabilities. To evaluate the effects of multiple ontologies and search methods, a consumer’s health query was posed using several health search methods