Wired’s Bodyhack blog reports on the complexity of medical jargon and the patient safety problems it poses.

Earlier this month, the Joint Commission, a hospital accreditation organization, put out a report on the problem of medical (il)literacy. “Far too often,” they said, “ordinary citizens are placed at risk for unsafe care because important health care information is communicated using medical jargon and unclear language that exceed their literacy skills.” The report recommended everything from medical interpreters to better consent forms and training staff to speak in plain language.

The comments are particularly interesting as they recount personal experiences of this problem.

Parallel problems exist for health care professionals who have to use computer systems to enter and review patient records. Controlled vocabularies, consistent user interfaces, even entering dates and times in a standard way become vital for patient safety. Microsoft’s Common User Interface (CUI) programme in collaboration with the UK’s National Health Service addresses some of these issues. Their introduction to the CUI describes some of the steps that required:

For example, it has put resources such as the British National Formulary into the research pane [in Microsoft Office], so they are easier to access. “At the moment, if a medical secretary needs to look up a drug name, she will probably have to go through a dictionary on her desk that might well be six months out of date,” says Mr Nolan. … Similarly, an NHS Abbreviations Manager has been created that will automatically ask the user exactly which condition is covered by an abbreviation that they type and encourage them to code it correctly.

(Full disclosure: I co-wrote this introduction for Microsoft which is one reason why I’m interested in the subject. Another reason is that a good friend of mine is a GP and he tells me scary stories of miscommunication in the medical world.)

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