Use of SNOMED CT® and LOINC® to standardize terminology for primary care asthma electronic health records

A SNOMED CT Mapping Guideline for the Local Terms Used to Document Clinical Findings and Procedures in Electronic Medical Records in South Korea: Methodological Study

BACKGROUND

South Korea joined SNOMED International as the 39th member country. To ensure semantic interoperability, South Korea introduced SNOMED CT (Systemized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms) in 2020. However, there is no methodology to map local Korean terms to SNOMED CT. Instead, this is performed sporadically and independently at each local medical institution. The quality of the mapping, therefore, cannot be guaranteed.

OBJECTIVE

This study aimed to develop and introduce a guideline to map local Korean terms to the SNOMED CT used to document clinical findings and procedures in electronic health records at health care institutions in South Korea.

METHODS

The guidelines were developed from December 2020 to December 2022. An extensive literature review was conducted. The overall structures and contents of the guidelines with diverse use cases were developed by referencing the existing SNOMED CT mapping guidelines, previous studies related to SNOMED CT mapping, and the experiences of the committee members. The developed guidelines were validated by a guideline review panel.

RESULTS

The SNOMED CT mapping guidelines developed in this study recommended the following 9 steps: define the purpose and scope of the map, extract terms, preprocess source terms, preprocess source terms using clinical context, select a search term, use search strategies to find SNOMED CT concepts using a browser, classify mapping correlations, validate the map, and build the final map format.

CONCLUSIONS

The guidelines developed in this study can support the standardized mapping of local Korean terms into SNOMED CT. Mapping specialists can use this guideline to improve the mapping quality performed at individual local medical institutions.

ISO/TR 12300:2016 for clinical cross-terminology mapping: contribution to nursing

This theoretical and reflective study aimed to assess the contribution of the ISO/TR 12300:2016 document for the mapping of nursing terminology. The referred document and related articles were used as an empirical framework. The study analyzed the content of the document, highlighting cardinality and equivalence principles. The standard presents conceptual and operational basis for mapping, with cardinality and equivalence as the support for the categorization of cross-terminology mapping in the area of nursing. Cardinality verifies candidate target terms to represent the source term, while the equivalence degree scale checks semantic correspondence. Among the principles included in the ISO/TR 12300:2016, cardinality and equivalence contribute to the accurate representation of the results of the cross-terminology mapping process and its use should decrease inconsistencies.

Coding and classifying GP data: the POLAR project

BACKGROUND

Data, particularly 'big' data are increasingly being used for research in health. Using data from electronic medical records optimally requires coded data, but not all systems produce coded data.

OBJECTIVE

To design a suitable, accurate method for converting large volumes of narrative diagnoses from Australian general practice records to codify them into SNOMED-CT-AU. Such codification will make them clinically useful for aggregation for population health and research purposes.

METHOD

The developed method consisted of using natural language processing to automatically code the texts, followed by a manual process to correct codes and subsequent natural language processing re-computation. These steps were repeated for four iterations until 95% of the records were coded. The coded data were then aggregated into classes considered to be useful for population health analytics.

RESULTS

Coding the data effectively covered 95% of the corpus. Problems with the use of SNOMED CT-AU were identified and protocols for creating consistent coding were created. These protocols can be used to guide further development of SNOMED CT-AU (SCT). The coded values will be immensely useful for the development of population health analytics for Australia, and the lessons learnt applicable elsewhere.

Toward a standard ontology of surgical process models

PURPOSE

The development of common ontologies has recently been identified as one of the key challenges in the emerging field of surgical data science (SDS). However, past and existing initiatives in the domain of surgery have mainly been focussing on individual groups and failed to achieve widespread international acceptance by the research community. To address this challenge, the authors of this paper launched a European initiative-OntoSPM Collaborative Action-with the goal of establishing a framework for joint development of ontologies in the field of SDS. This manuscript summarizes the goals and the current status of the international initiative.

METHODS

A workshop was organized in 2016, gathering the main European research groups having experience in developing and using ontologies in this domain. It led to the conclusion that a common ontology for surgical process models (SPM) was absolutely needed, and that the existing OntoSPM ontology could provide a good starting point toward the collaborative design and promotion of common, standard ontologies on SPM.

RESULTS

The workshop led to the OntoSPM Collaborative Action-launched in mid-2016-with the objective to develop, maintain and promote the use of common ontologies of SPM relevant to the whole domain of SDS. The fundamental concept, the architecture, the management and curation of the common ontology have been established, making it ready for wider public use.

CONCLUSION

The OntoSPM Collaborative Action has been in operation for 24 months, with a growing dedicated membership. Its main result is a modular ontology, undergoing constant updates and extensions, based on the experts' suggestions. It remains an open collaborative action, which always welcomes new contributors and applications.