Completion of the third phase of the Intersocial project

The TIC Salut Social Foundation in collaboration with the Ministry of Labour, Social Affairs and Families and with the expertise of various professionals from organizations in the field of health and social care such as the Barcelona Provincial Council, Barcelona City Council, the Ministry of Health and other departments and entities, completed in March 2021 the third phase of the Intersocial project that was started in September 2020.

In order to continue to make progress towards a common controlled vocabulary that allows a greater integration of the data of Catalan social services, a third phase of the project was created, Intersocial 3, with the aim of broadening the definition of a controlled vocabulary. to standardize the problems, factors and observations in the field of social care through the study of new cases of use in the field of dependents, children and young people.

The following outcomes have been obtained:

• An overall review of all the concepts codified in the first and second phase, during which, through the consensus and efforts of all the professionals participating in the working groups, certain concepts were eliminated or their category changed in order to create an updated and purely social dictionary.
• The inclusion of new concepts.
• A mapping of the list of problems, factors and observations using the leading controlled vocabulary standard, SNOMED CT. A list of 251 coded concepts is currently available.
• The creation of a document which, through the consensus of all the professionals in the working group, contains the most relevant social assessment scales and instruments used by the community of professionals.
• And finally, the Foundation has created a website to integrate the dictionary within the information systems of Catalan social services and which contains the following sections:

– The first, describes and offers information on the InterSocial project.

– The second is an area for downloading the updated concepts. The third phase of the project aims to make this environment the place to go to search for the project’s concepts which have been expanded through the work sessions involving the collaborating group of experts.

– The third section is a search page where you can search for Intersocial concepts in a dynamic way, entering whole or partial keywords.

– Finally, the last section is dedicated to ViquiTermSocial. This is a tool that uses Artificial Intelligence to facilitate the selection of concepts for encoding a text (an interview, a report). Since it is an unproven tool, a first pilot test was carried out from November 2020 to February 2021 involving more than a dozen professionals and the collection of about 100 entries integrating text from interviews and reports.

To continue to help improving the integration of data from Catalan social services, during 2021 the TIC Salut Social Foundation will work on the proposal to integrate the dictionary into the Catalan social services information systems.