Evaluating the Coverage of Health Informatics Terms in the MeSH Thesaurus: Critical Analysis of a Newly Created Health Informatics Glossary

Abstract

As an integral part of the Master in Health Informatics (MHI) program at Dalhousie University, internship provides a good opportunity for MHI students to apply academic health informatics knowledge in healthcare work to real world with the purpose of improving the students’ critical thinking ability through hand-on experiences. The 13-week internship was performed at Medical Informatics at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. It consists of two components: (i) Updating Medicine Critical Appraisal for Postgraduate Medical Education, an online Blackboard Learning System course in Dalhousie University, and adding new contents in the field of Health Informatics; (ii) Developing a new glossary specialized in Health Informatics and evaluating the coverage of this glossary in MeSH thesaurus. During the internship, the intern acquired comprehensive knowledge of critical appraisal in medical and health informatics and honed critical thinking skills in identifying problems and coming up with health informatics solutions. In developing and evaluating a new glossary in health informatics as part of the internship, the intern found that the new glossary, based on key words from ITCH 2009 Conference Proceedings, couldn’t match MeSH thesaurus very well. Although this is consistent with the results of previous studies, the intern recommended that further steps be taken to analyze the reasons in more depth. Finally, the intern identified certain gaps between what is needed in the updated course and what is currently available and recommended further actions to bridge the gap.