Distributed Terminology
Development
Distributed Workflow
Automation
Store and Forward
Telemedicine
Orders Management
We have the expertise and experience to improve your controlled terminology development.
Case Studies
Distributed Terminology Development
The health-care industry and government agencies are looking to computer-based tools to reduce health-care expense, to assess the quality of health-care providers, and to deliver health-care services more efficiently. A core component of these tools will be a Controlled Medical Terminology (CMT).
Many health-care applications rely on clinical terminology to represent data about patients. The functionality of any data-management application is inseparably linked to its underlying terminology. If the terminology cannot represent the distinctions that an application needs, that application will fail either because the data acquisition fails to support an appropriate discourse with the user or because the terminology must also have sufficient structure to allow application developers to reproducibly apply it, since an application's promised functions are enabled by algorithms that process information using an appropriate clinical terminology.
Formalization of a robust CMT is a challenging task. Terminologies such as SNOMED are very large with more than 350,000 concepts, and over 1.4 million semantic relationships. Terminologies of this size cannot be managed by a single developer, nor can all the design decisions necessary to approach completion of the formalization be made in advance. Therefore, an evolutionary design approach is required.
Keith’s dissertation describes architectural design and implementation experience supporting distributed terminology development across a federation of (usually) cooperating participants. This project resulted in the development and release of SNOMED-RT in May 2000, and is still active at Kaiser Permenante.
We have applied many of the lessons learned from this project to our Distributed Workflow Project, which promises to overcome many of the limitations of the previous CMT project infrastructure.