DOCTORS rely on patients to describe their symptoms much more than you would think. But neither patients nor doctors are formally trained in small group communication techniques to best elicit reliable diagnostic information, and there is not yet a tricorder to examine patients in an instant, as imagined on the Star Trek TV show. Translating a patient’s description into medical terminology that can reliably be used for diagnostics by doctors and medical techs is a semantic challenge. Taxonomy Strategies has worked on projects designed to support exactly this use case.
Taxonomy Strategies consultants developed an ontology that mapped symptoms to the medical specialties that typically treat the related conditions. The Medicare Care Compare site repurposes reimbursement enrollment databases and National Library of Medicine health information resources from MedlinePlus to support consumer searching for health care referrals.
Read about the project and listen to a discussion about the lessons learned:
- KOS Design for Health Care Decision-making Based on Consumer Criteria and User Stories [Paper] [Slides] presented by Joseph Busch and Vivian Bliss at the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications in Copenhagen on October 15, 2016.
- Designing for Values Based Information Seeking [Video and Slides] presented by Vivian Bliss and Susan Golden at World IA Day in Seattle, WA on February 24, 2018.
For Medicare, Taxonomy Strategies also led a team that worked with diverse stakeholders including industry, policy consultants, and regulators to determine and validate a taxonomy for tagging health insurance-related content so it could easily be found, used, and shared on healthcare.gov (scroll over Topics). The scheme provided the basis for the initial content strategy to educate consumers about health insurance and provided the foundation for customer support once the federal facilitated exchanges were launched.
MEDICINE is a complex domain with a multiplicity of terminologies and the highest requirements for accuracy. Taxonomy Strategies is often engaged to work with diverse stakeholders who each have their own specialized terminology set to develop a unified taxonomy framework so that content can be readily accessible regardless of the point of view. We do this by using best practices in taxonomy development, an evidence-based approach, and by using knowledge management techniques to establish and maintain common ground among these various stakeholder groups.
For example, Taxonomy Strategies worked with the American College of Cardiology (ACC) to merge existing taxonomies from various groups (scholarly publications, public communications, annual meeting, practice guidelines, educational products, membership, and others) into a unified taxonomy framework. To kick off the new approach to tagging ACC website content using the unified taxonomy, we designed and facilitated a workshop for key stakeholders. The workshop featured hands-on activities where everyone tagged the same set of representative content created by different stakeholder groups.
Taxonomy Strategies has used this tagging workshop approach for many years. In 2009, we worked with the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) to implement a unified taxonomy to tag and search for content across SAMHSA libraries (publications, evidence based practices, resource libraries, video libraries, 988 materials, and others). The taxonomy was validated in a content tagging workshop similar to the approach used at ACC.
HEALTH RESEARCH AND POLICY aims to promote health and prevent diseases by studying populations and developing population-targeted programs. One of the great challenges is effectively communicating complex health research results and recommended policies in clear and simple messaging. The Covid-19 emergency and its aftermath has made this challenge painfully clear.
For many years and with many organizations, Taxonomy Strategies has worked on projects that distill large numbers of detailed keywords into salient topics that effectively group content and people into sets and subsets, which is useful in content management applications like Microsoft SharePoint, Adobe Experience Manager, and Salesforce.com.
For example, our Taxonomy Strategies consultants worked with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation knowledge management team to develop 1) a set of broad topics that originated in health policy program research, synthesis and evaluation; 2) a common set of content types; and 3) a set of common demographics categories. The scheme was intended to be implemented in various functional areas including public communications, grants management, research and evaluation, and development. See the public implementation in Focus Areas, Find a Grant, and Awarded Grants on the RWJF website.
Taxonomy Strategies has used taxonomy best practices to derive faceted taxonomies from existing data and content models for many years. In 2008, we worked with a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) agency-wide working group facilitating a series of workshops to develop a faceted taxonomy for tagging public and intranet content. The taxonomy was validated by sorting popular query terms and evaluating tagging consistency with FDA staff. Change management and training materials were also prepared. See the public FDA website menus.