Medical Terminology Fundamentals for Health Sciences Librarians

Rescheduled to: Tuesday, December 15, 2026, 1:00pm–2:30pm, Central Time

A basic understanding of medical terminology is fundamental knowledge for clinical librarians. This course offers an introduction to the structure of medical terms, positional and directional terms, essential abbreviations and hospital words, and elementary terms by body system. Additionally, learners will be provided resources to further their skills and knowledge. This content-based course will be delivered synchronously.  Active learning will be facilitated through frequent interactive review. While not comprehensive, this course is designed to give you the building blocks to break down and recognize medical terms with a focus on recognition rather than extensive memorization.  Through increased familiarity and comfort with medical language, librarians will develop increased confidence in clinical, educational and research settings, whether consulting with a provider or developing complex search strategies.

Audience

Medical librarians and other information professionals who want a basic understanding or quick refresher on medical terminology, with a focus on entry-level skills and clinical rounding.

Learning Outcomes:

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Recognize medical terms and how they are applied to body systems and functions
• Recognize terms applied to diseases, diagnoses, and treatments
• Identify and define prefixes, roots, and suffixes to combine forms of terminology.

Presenters:

Jennifer Lyon, M.Ed., M.L.I.S., M.Sc., is an experienced medical librarian with extensive clinical experience rounding with hospital teams in pediatrics, adult internal medicine, and intensive care and supporting emergency resident training. Her background spans academic health sciences center, hospital library, policy center, and healthcare industry roles. She has served as an assistant information specialist for the Cochrane Collaboration and has conducted and written multiple systematic reviews. Additionally, she has taught both medical terminology and clinical rounding skills for MLA. Her master’s in education thesis focused on developing a clinical training asynchronous course for rounding librarians.

Ariel Pomputius, MLIS, AHIP, has been involved in teaching a medical terminology workshop through the University of Florida Health Science Center Library since 2017. In 2024, she worked with her colleague Courtney Pyche to turn their longtime synchronous course into a virtual asynchronous workshop. Although her background is in Classical Studies (surprisingly useful when it comes to medical terminology, actually), she has been a health sciences librarian at the University of Florida since 2015 and works with multiple departments in the College of Medicine.

Courtney Pyche, MSI, AHIP, CHIS, has taught the Medical Terminology workshop at the University of Florida Health Science Center Library since 2023. In 2024, she co-created with Ariel Pomputius an adaptation of an online synchronous version of this course to an online asynchronous version through LibWizard Tutorials. She has presented this project regionally and is currently working on a book chapter to describe this process. She graduated with her M.S. in Information in 2020.