Today, patients in many locations have the opportunity to access their medical records online. The main purpose to providing this information is to promote participation in the care of oneself. A plus is that it also reduces the time a physician must spend on simple information sharing, freeing up time to focus on more specialised skills. One problem, however, is that understanding the medical jargon in records can be a challenge, even for professional caregivers.
The PPCP project set out to ease the risk of miscommunication. The resulting development will be an application that ‘translates’ – or rather explains – the difficult words of a medical record into the plain language of choice, including colloquial Northern Sami, Arabic, Somali, and Tigrinya. This is done in a web interface showing an individual’s medical record. By clicking a difficult term, an explanation will appear.
The application will permit patient versions of any type of medical information – regardless of specialty and language - although the current pilot is focused on records related to ‘heart attack’ in the five Nordic languages and English. The interface will be accessible in all types of electronic media, especially mobile devices. The project is still looking for reference group members who are passionate about improving digital communications between professionals and patients, particularly in the heart field.
Goals
- To develop a plugin that links multilingual professional and non-professional language.
- To showcase how the plugin works when a heart attack patient wants to understand his or her medical record.
Developing a Nordic ecosystem for health innovation
The project is one of the seven projects funded under the Innovative Nordic Health and Welfare Solutions call that was launched in 2014. The aim of the call was to unite and strengthen efforts across the Nordics to develop a Nordic ecosystem for health innovation and create opportunities for Nordic businesses through a closer connection between developers, demanders and test environments.
The call is part of the lighthouse project Innovative Nordic Welfare Solutions initiated by the five Nordic ministries of business through the Nordic Co-operation Programme for Business and Innovation Policy 2014-2017. The project shall contribute to making the Nordics a leading region in developing and exporting innovative health and welfare solutions.
Project partners:
Interverbum Technology (lead)
Sweden
Lingsoft Language Management
Finland
Copenhagen Translation
Denmark
