“Wherever there is a nurse, there is a use for ATIC”

ATIC terminology is a nursing interface language that contains codified concepts close to natural language. It is used to represent the care delivery process and its results in health care information systems. Unlike other traditional language systems, “ATIC makes direct understanding of the terms easier due to its closeness to natural language”. That is how Maria Eulàlia Juvé, the Assistant for Knowledge, Information Systems and Data Science at the Care Department of the Catalan Institute of Health (ICS) explained it in an interview with the TIC Salut Social Foundation on the occasion of the publication of ATIC in the Terminological Server. In 1992, Juvé created this terminology, which is currently used in 18 hospitals and most primary care centres in Catalonia, through the ARES programme.

Scope of use of ATIC terminology

ATIC includes concepts to represent any care delivery in any health and public health field. In other words, as Juvé says, “wherever there is a nurse, there is a use for ATIC”.

The representation of the care delivery process includes the nurses’ observations, assessments and monitoring of patients, but also all the diagnostic reasoning behind each of the actions they take. As Juvé points out, “this diagnostic reasoning helps and is aimed at demarcating and understanding the very nature of nursing activity, which is very much oriented towards prevention, not just caring and curing, but preventing more things from happening than are already happening”.

The terminology also contains a system of nursing diagnosis equivalences, essentially with the ICD-10, the 10th revision of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems. That makes it easier for professionals and different health care information systems to communicate.

ATIC in the Terminological Server

ATIC is structured in three main areas (assessment, diagnosis and intervention) and 10 secondary areas (actions and conditions; attributes; beneficiaries; scales and units of measurement; space, location and position; focus; judgement; products, medicines, food and substances; resources, means and context; and temporality).

Since December 2022, health professionals in Catalonia have had the ATIC catalogue available on the Terminological Server thanks to the work of the Interoperability and Technologies team at the TIC Salut Social Foundation, the Catalogues Area of the Department of Health and the active collaboration of ATIC’s creator.

Juvé says that this is an outstanding milestone, since “in system architecture and the organisation of a health system, it is essential to have a tool such as the Terminological Server that can provide a service to providers and professionals, and also indirectly to patients and relatives, based on the standardised catalogues of clinical language in the field of health”.

You can watch the full interview with Maria Eulàlia Juvé in this video uploaded to the TIC Salut Social Foundation’s YouTube channel.