ICD9, ICD10 and SNOMED, a guest blog

“Knowing that yesterday’s blog about ICD-10 would raise questions about how HITSP will incorporate ICD-10 into its future work products as well as the role of SNOMED verses ICD-10 as a clinical vocabulary, I asked one of our HITSP Technical Committee Co-chairs to give me his perspective. Jamie Ferguson leads standards efforts for Kaiser and he gave me his permission to publish his personal thoughts on ICD9, ICD10 and SNOMED, which provide helpful background about the issues.”
Article
John Halamka, Life as a Healthcare CIO, 30 October 2008

Voice recognition: boldly going further

“In sci-fi land, the commander of the spaceship speaks to his computer – and the computer speaks back. Recent developments in voice recognition and wireless technology make this an increasingly reachable scenario within a hospital.
Already, some NHS staff are wearing badges that that they can use to contact any other badge-wearing member of staff. Telephone handsets are being piloted that allow nurses to say the name of a piece of equipment to find the location of the nearest item to them.”
Special Report
e-Health Insider, 11 September 2008

see also

SNOMED CT Gets an Upgrade

“The International Health Terminology Standards Development Organization in Copenhagen, Denmark, has released its second enhancement this year of the SNOMED CT clinical terminology.”
Article
Health Data Management, 11 August 2008

La interoperabilidad semántica se fijará en el coste-beneficio para avanzar

“Ingenieros y clínicos deben caminar de la mano para que la interoperabilidad semántica avance, ya que es un campo imprescindible para la actual sanidad que sólo en los dos o tres últimos años ha avanzado realmente. Para que esta progresión siga, e incluso aumente, habrá que fijarse en el coste-beneficio y ver dónde aporta un valor añadido.”
Article (Spanish)
David Rodríguez Carenas, Diario Medico, 30 July 2008

International health terminology toolset in development

“The International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO) has launched a campaign to build an essential health terminology toolset to improve access to the tools needed to develop, maintain, and use SNOMED CT in health systems around the world.”
Article
e-Health Europe, 18 July 2008

CfH technology boss says paper not fit for purpose

“Connecting for Health’s chief technology officer, Paul Jones has stressed the importance of integrating standards to achieve interoperability in healthcare, saying paper is “no longer fit for purpose”.
Speaking at last week’s Connecting for Health’s SNOMED CT and interoperable healthcare conference, Jones said health providers were under increased pressure to ensure the care they provide is “safe, effective, reproducible and state-of-the-art”.”
Article
e-Health Insider, 7 July 2008

HISA2008 - health records and standards

“The first plenary speaker for Friday is given by Lee Seldon from Swinburne University of Technology in Sarawak on the topic of ‘FOSS, health records, infrastructure and ’standards”. He started from the premise that the purpose of the health record is (or should be) to benefit the patient, rather than simply the Health Ministry/Department. He referenced ISO 18308 in respect of criteria/architecture for EHRs and gave a detailed overview of standards and coding (such as ICD-9 and SNOMED) that deal with health records. He said that the greatest most common denominator for standards in English, with XML being the second most common.”
Article
Peter Murray, Hi-Blogs.info, 20 June 2008

Made in IBM Labs: New Data Sharing Technology

“IBM, in collaboration with the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s (NTI) Global Health and Security Initiative and the Middle East Consortium on Infectious Disease Surveillance (MECIDS), has created a unique technology that standardizes the method of sharing health information and automates the analysis of infectious disease outbreaks, in order to help contain diseases and minimize their impact.”
Article
eHealth News.eu, 16 June 2008

MADE IN IBM LABS: New Data Sharing Technology Speeds International Collaboration to Identify and Respond to Infectious Diseases

“IBM, in collaboration with the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s (NTI) Global Health and Security Initiative and the Middle East Consortium on Infectious Disease Surveillance (MECIDS), has created a unique technology that standardizes the method of sharing health information and automates the analysis of infectious disease outbreaks, in order to help contain diseases and minimize their impact.”
Article
CNN Money, 2 June 2008

Govt gets serious about e-health implementation

“The National E-Health Transaction Authority (NETA) will this year action its spate of electronic health projects, set to revolutionise the operations of Australian hospitals and clinics.”
Article
Darren Pauli, Computerworld Australia, 21 May 2008

Microsoft’s health vision is highly proprietary

“As more details emerge about Microsoft’s health strategy, such as its Common User Interface, one thing that becomes clear is that its vision is highly proprietary.
While the result is highly attractive, dependence on technologies such as Microsoft Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation guarantees the benefits will flow mainly to Microsoft customers.
The Microsoft Common User Interface, in other words, is not common at all.”
Article
Dana Blankenhorst, ZDNet Healthcare, 13 May 2008

Call for semantic health interoperability

“A leading UK academic has called for a new push on the development of semantic electronic health records based on ‘clinical archetypes’ as the only viable route to deliver fully interoperable electronic health care records, writes Jon Hoeksma in Slovenia.
Dr Dipak Kalra of University College London said clinical archetypes, or “clinical shapes” need to be used in tandem with the advanced clinical standards terminology of SNOMED CT to develop fully interoperable EHRs. He described archetypes as a tool “for building clinical consensus in a consistent ways”.”
Article
e-Health Europe, 6 May 2008

FDBE releases SNOMED CT-based condition check

“Clinical decision support specialist, First DataBank Europe (FDBE) has released live condition checking content within its drug knowledge base, the Multilex Drug Data File (Multilex DDF).
The new content supports the SNOMED CT based condition checking functionality, released in July 2006, and means that patient data recorded using SNOMED CT codes can be used within a Multilex DDF condition check.”
Article
eHealth Insider, 1 February 2008

Using UMLS to map from a Library to a Clinical Classification: Improving the Functionality of a Digital Library

Judas Robinson, Simon de Lusignan, Patty Kostkova and Bruce Madge
St. George’s, University of London;
City eHealth Research Ctr., Inst. of Health Science, City Univ.;
British Medical Assoc. Library, BMA House, Tavistock Square, London, UK

Abstract

The Metathesaurus of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) offers the possibility of mapping between various medical vocabularies. The Primary Care Electronic Library (PCEL) contains a database of over six thousand Medical Subject Headings (MeSH terms) describing the resources of the electronic library. We were interested to know if it was possible to map from MeSH to the Systemized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT). Such a mapping would aid healthcare professionals to retrieve relevant data from our digital library as it would enable links between clinical systems and indexed material.

SNOMED-CT: The Advanced Terminology and Coding System for eHealth

Kevin Donelly
SNOMED® International, College of American Pathologists, Northfield, Illinois, USA

Abstract

A clinical terminology is essential for Electronic Health records. It represents clinical information input into clinical IT systems by clinicians in a machine-readable manner. Use of a Clinical Terminology, implemented within a clinical information system, will enable the delivery of many patient health benefits including electronic clinical decision support, disease screening and enhanced patient safety. For example, it will help reduce medication-prescribing errors, which are currently known to kill or injure many citizens. It will also reduce clinical administration effort and the overall costs of healthcare.