Representing patient preference-related concepts for inclusion in electronic health records

In recent years shared decision making between patients and their health care providers and the inclusion of patient preferences in patient care have been, in theory, embraced as models for good clinical practice. Patients' experiences, values, and preferences are increasingly acknowledged as important pieces of evidence for appropriate health care decision making. To effectively use information about patient preferences in patient care, this information, which is gathered through a process of preference elicitation, needs to be integrated with other types of information, e.g., diagnoses, treatments, and patient status indicators within the context of a longitudinal electronic health record. This integration requires that patient preference-related concepts be represented nonambiguously and in a manner that renders them suitable for computer rather than human processing. In this article, the authors describe important patient preference-related concepts and illustrate the use of the LOINC semantic structure as a terminology model to create fully specified names for a sample of 15 preference elicitations from 8 published research articles.