Re: MeSH

["Douglas Carnall" <dougie@carnall.org>]

At Sun, 20 Jul 2003 17:44:24 -0400 georgw@galis.org wrote:

>>MeSH stands for "Machine Subject Headings" -- its a standard to
>
>I'm prob wrong about that ;-)

Yes, it is Medical Subject Headings I believe. Of course, the term
predates wide access to computing machines. I am just old enough to
remember being shown how to use the 14 volume telephone directory that
used to be Index Medicus in the medical school library.

MeSH is interesting, and serves its purpose fairly well: to classify
medical papers by subject. But the subset of meta-information about a
medical publication is smaller than the set of meta-information about
medicine (arguably).

It is interesting that (to my knowledge) no-one has ever tried to use
MeSH headings to create an EMR/EPR. There is probably a good reason for
this, but I'm not sure if I know what it is. One advantage to using it
clinically is that it might be quite easy to hitch up a clinical system
to PubMed and get it to download useful publications about the patient's
problem in real time in the consultation.

Would be a neat trick even if you didn't ever have time to read them :-)

Regards to all,

D.

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Douglas Carnall
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