Two articles published about the Clinical Dictionary for iHealth and the use of terminological servers in the “Papeles Médicos” magazine of the SEDOM

Fundació TicSalut has taken part in the writing of two articles that have been published in the latest number of the “Papeles Médicos” magazine of the SEDOM (Spanish Society of Medical Documentation).

The first article presents the Clinical Dictionary for iHealth, a transversal project aimed at standardising the controlled vocabulary used at SISCAT (Health System Integrated in the Catalan Public Health Network) in order to exchange information. The Dictionary is based on SNOMED CT as reference ontology for representation and terminology. This way, other controlled vocabularies (such as ATC, CIM-9-MC, LOINC) continue to be used but the majority of them are mapped at SNOMED CT in order to link and exchange information from different origins and domains. The Dictionary has SNOMED CT subsets and all the new concepts that need to be created are placed in the Catalan extension of this standard.

The other article gives an example of how to use terminological servers in order to automate the coding of the information gathered by carers from their Clinical Workstations. With these tools professionals can register structured information without having to work directly with codes and, what is more, a centralised repository, separated from controlled vocabularies, is obtained, thus offering new management and distribution functionalities. The article presents a simulated Clinical Workstation developed by the CCI (Centre of Integration Competencies of the Fundació Tecnocampus) and shows how the web services of a terminological server are used in order to register adverse reactions to immunisations. The information obtained is associated to SNOMED CT concepts, so that the data are stored codified and standardised automatically.