Mapping nurses' natural language to oncology patients' symptom expressions.

Systems that integrate information from both the patients and health professionals require bi-directional term translation. We manually extracted nursing terms from 25 randomly selected cancer patients' charts that expressed symptoms and mapped these to a set of patient-oriented symptoms from a cancer support system. We found that 40% of the nursing terms were synonyms of patient expressions that could be mapped directly; however 38% of the nursing terms required a map to more than one patient expression. In this study, we gained an understanding of the link between nursing and patient language that is needed for future system development.