Using a terminology server and consumer search phrases to help patients find physicians with particular expertise.

Objectives: To design and implement a real world application using a terminology server to assist patients and physicians who use common language search terms to find specialist physicians with a particular clinical expertise.

Method: Terminology servers have been developed to help users encoding of information using complicated structured vocabulary during data entry tasks, such as recording clinical information. We describe a methodology using Personal Health Terminology trade mark and a SNOMED CT-based hierarchical concept server.