An Experiment in Simplifying Lingo

Aerospace engineers speak in cryptic acronyms. Computer geeks are fluent in abstruse technical jargon. Lawyer’s lingo is laden with legal Latin and psychologists have their own, well, psychobabble.

There is Airspeak for air traffic controllers; Seaspeak for seafaring radio operators. Just about every scientific discipline has developed a specialized dialect to express its nuances precisely, with the result that almost no one else can understand them.

Like all specialists, doctors are searching for a common language, to avoid the misunderstandings that can hurt a patient’s health. Who can tell if “MI” on a patient’s chart means myocardial infarction, mitral insufficiency or masticatory impairment?

Doctors at Vanderbilt and Emory universities recently devised a limited vocabulary in which every word has a precise, pre-agreed meaning. They took 891,770 medical chart comments written by 1,961 doctors for 74,696 patients at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta over six years, and reduced those comments to 15,534 “canonical” comments.

And that terse “clinicese” seemed to communicate more effectively, the doctors reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Only 3% of the rephrased medical charts were misleading or clinically dangerous.