Groundwork – Abbreviations and Acronyms
Introduction
The design groundwork explorations in the Design Guidance Exploration – Abbreviations
and Acronyms and Design Guidance Exploration – Abbreviations and Acronyms in Free
Text documents provide you with design principles and guidance for displaying abbreviations
and acronyms in clinical applications. These design explorations enable unambiguous
display of acronyms and abbreviations in display fields and free input text, 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 ideas presented in these documents are for community preview and consultation
only. Further design and patient safety assessments are required to finalize the
content as CUI Design Guidance.
Summary
These design groundwork explorations focus on displaying acronyms and abbreviations, and include
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