Wiki Content by: Yong IL Choi, Debbie Crownover, and Lauren Wiseman and GOS (guide-on-the-side) Home | Hardware & Software Standards | Health IT Standards | Privacy and Security Standards | Terminology Standards
GOS Note: This team has done an awesome job of succinctly summarizing this highly important content. Here are my take-away comments: Remember: 1. Terminology standards are incredibly dynamic and changing all the time. You simply cannot memorize something in this area and expect it to be current next year. 2. It is important to recognize that existing nursing language/terminology standards are necessary but not sufficient for good health IT work at present. Each has strengths and weaknesses. None of them are good enough to stand alone (IMHO) but there are folks in nursing who argue vehemently for their favorite one! 3. SNOMED is sort of becoming the de facto terminology standard. All the recognized ANA nursing languages are either already included or being added. Purists will tell you that SNOMED is not adequate for nursing. Since I'm not an expert on this topic, I'll suggest you do more homework if you need a definitive answer on whether to use SNOMED instead of or in addition to a recognized nursing language. 4. Terminology and language standards exist because we desperately need them! But the complexity makes it difficult to have a single standard that meets everyone's needs at present.
Clinical Terminology Standards Terminology is the study of terms and their use — of words and compound words that are used in specific contexts. Terminology also denotes a more formal discipline which systematically studies the labeling or designating of concepts particular to one or more subject fields or domains of human activity, through research and analysis of terms in context, for the purpose of documenting and promoting correct usage. This study can be limited to one language or can cover more than one language at the same time (multilingual terminology, bilingual terminology, and so forth). Definitions per Wikipedia. Terminology can be characterized by its structure into three categories: Nomenclature - describes a list of ideas with little structure Classification - groups with common or related ideas Ontology - most complex structure that designates and defines class and certain relationships between them. Background Standardized terminology has a long history in the scientific community, but in healthcare, clinical terminology has only begun to evolve in the last two decades. Adoption of a standardized clinical terminology is essential in the development of electronic health records.This is a formidable challenge, requiring many terminologies to encompass the scope of users, including healthcare providers and consumers. This standards page is devoted to Nursing terminology and its relationship to health information technology. Terminology Planning and Language Planning While the focus of language planning is the deliberate manipulation and development of a linguistic entity to improve communication in society or a language community at large, terminology planning may be language independent or in its objective across languages, aiming at the improvement of communication in a specific domain or application thereof. While terminology planning is an important part of language planning it may be useful for language communities to separate the two activities for simplification of its complexity in order to better focus programs and resources, and thus receive better results. Because language planning also concerns the development of the lexicon of a language, and because domain communication consists to a great extent of linguistic representations of concepts there exists a large area of overlapping between the two concepts. The biggest difference lies in the different point of view and scope (and goal). Nursing Terminology Standards Data Element Set NMDS (Nursing Minimum Data Set)
NMMDS (Nursing Management Minimum Data Set ) and US NMDS
Interface Terminologies CCC (Clinical Care Classification)
ICNP (International Conference on Network Protocols)
NIC and NOC are combined onto one web page of the University of Iowa’s Centers for Excellence. Both are recognized by the ANA and have been implemented by several Clinical Information Systems. For more information on these, please contact the University of Iowa.
NANDA (North American Nursing Diagnosis Association)
Omaha System:
PNDS (Perioperative Nursing Data Set)
Multidisciplinary terminologies ABCCodes:
GALEN:
ICD (International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems) The International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (most commonly known by the abbreviation ICD) provides codes to classify diseases and a wide variety of signs, symptoms, abnormal findings, complaints, social circumstances and external causes of injury or disease. Every health condition can be assigned to a unique category and given a code, up to six characters long. Such categories can include a set of similar diseases. LOINC* (Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes)
SNOMED CT* (Systematic Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms)
UMLS (Unified Medical Language System)
* SNOMED is subsuming the ANA recognized nursing terminologies and seems to be coming up as "the" solution for the NHII, probably along with LOINC. Areas in Need of Further Development
Pharmacology standard RxNorm:
There is a growing conviction that in all hospitals, even in those which are best conducted,there is a great and unnecessary waste of life;. . . In attempting to arrive at the truth, I have applied everywhere for information, but in scarcely an instance have I been able to obtain hospital records fit for any purpose of comparison. If they could be obtained, they would enable us to decide many other questions besides the one alluded to. . . [I]f wisely used, these improved statistics would tell us more of the relative value of particular operations and modes of treatment than we have any means of obtaining at present. They would enable us, besides, to ascertain the influence of the hospital . . . upon the general course of operations and diseases passing through its wards; and the truth thus ascertained would enable us to save life and suffering and to improve the treatment and management of the sick. . . J. Ozbolt, M. Wilson, D. O’Brien To obtain “records fit for any purpose of comparison,” we must use the same terms to represent the same concepts and have the same understanding of how the concepts relate to one another. In computer based systems, we must do this so that humans understand the words they read at the interface and that computers understand the unambiguous, abstract formalisms that encode the meanings “behind the scenes.” References Levy, B. (2004). Evolving to clinical terminology. J Healthc Inf Manag, 18(3), 37-43. Nightingale F. Notes on Hospitals, ed 3. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green; 1863. pp 175-176. Ozbolt, J., Wilson, M., O’Brien, D. Much ado about terminology standards, Journal of PeriAnesthesia Nursing, Volume 22, Issue 4, Pages 280-284 Weblinks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminology Definition of terminology per Wikipedia http://nursingworld.org/npii/terminologies.htmhttp:// ANA Recognized Terminologies and Data Element Sets www.hhs.gov/healthit/community/background/ The American Health Information Community (AHIC) is a federal advisory body, chartered in 2005 to make recommendations to the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on how to accelerate the development and adoption of health information technology. http://www.ihtsdo.org International Health Terminology Standards Development Organization http://www.bioontology.org The National Centers for Biomedical Computing (NCBCs) comprise seven centers dedicated to the development of a national infrastructure for biomedical computation. http://www.opengalen.org The website of the OpenGALEN Foundation http://aspe.hhs.gov/sp/nhii/standards.html The National Health Information Infrastructure http://dlthede.net/CNPII/Glossary.htm A link to Glossary Home | Hardware & Software Standards | Health IT Standards | Privacy and Security Standards | Terminology Standards |