Guidance – Abbreviations and Acronyms
Introduction
The documents Design Guidance Exploration – Abbreviations and Acronyms and Design Guidance Exploration – Abbreviations and Acronyms in Free Text
provide you with design principles and guidance for displaying abbreviations and acronyms in clinical applications. The guidance enables
unambiguous display of acronyms and abbreviations in free text input and display fields, while enhancing patient safety and clinical application
usability, by:
- Enabling consistent representation and handling of abbreviations and acronyms
- Minimizing the probability of confusion with similar terms
- Reducing the cognitive load of users, therefore making errors less likely
The guidance presented in these documents is for community preview and consultation only. Further design and patient safety assessments
are required to finalize the content as CUI Design Guidance.
Summary of Guidance
The guidance focuses on displaying acronyms and abbreviations, and includes recommendations for:
- Displaying acronyms and abbreviations, including the application of capitalization and punctuation
- Resolving known dangerous or ambiguous abbreviations
- Providing potential abbreviation and acronym expansions for insertion
- Providing alerts for unexpanded abbreviations and acronyms
- Avoiding or displaying the meaning of acronyms and abbreviations