A Terminology Service Compliant to CTS2 to Manage Semantics within the Regional HIE

Abstract

Objec ves: The correct seman cs management represents a fundamental requirement to create health informa on exchange (HIE) systems able to support clinical data sharing. A research is now underway to set up an infrastructure to aggregate data coming from health informa on systems, and it will be experimented to support regional HIE in Veneto region, Italy. Methods: In the fi rst period, the focus was on the seman cs management of Clinical Document Architecture Release 2 (CDA R2) laboratory reports, in which observa ons must be encoded using LOINC ® vocabulary. The exis ng components considered were the Laboratory Informa on Systems (LISs) of the local departments of the region (23 units) and the regional HIE. To manage the seman cs of the data, the design and the implementa on of a terminology service, the Health Terminology Service (HTS), compliant to the Common Terminology Service Release 2 (CTS2) standard was considered. Results: The HTS, formed by a set of web services, as CTS2 indicates, is the core of the proposed infrastructure. It is connected with an applica on that allows crea ng, dele ng, upda ng and managing the versioning of the maps between the laboratory observa ons and the LOINC ® en es. Conclusions: The adop on of CTS2 specifi ca on allows the HTS to support diff erent use cases, which are essen al to supports the clinical data sharing of the HIE content. During the development, the authors faced some problems that cause a delay in the implementa on of the solu on. The authors are s ll working to connect the HTS with the exis ng systems and to improve the solu on.

Standards for the Reuse of Clinical Data in Research: the Connection of the Liguria HIV Network and the CISAI Cohort

“…is performed according to the principles of the Healthcare Service Specification Project (HSSP) jointly developed by HL7 and OMG [2]. Specifically, the mapping is performed according to the definitions collected into the specifications of the Common Terminology Service -Release 2 [12]. In this way, the data present in the LHN repository is ready to be transferred to external observational studies, since they can be interpreted in a homogeneous way.…”

Healthcare Associated Infections: An Interoperable Infrastructure for Multidrug Resistant Organism Surveillance

“…The second component was the Health Terminology Service (HTS). Its interfaces are compliant to the Common Terminology Service Release 2 (CTS2) [37,38] and its aim is to correctly manage semantics-a fundamental aspect when it is necessary to compare clinical data from different care facilities which adopt specific local terminologies [39]. Finally, some of the authors designed and developed the Patient Identity Service (PIS), which is a solution to manage identifiers, defined within different care facilities, and the relations among them-a crucial topic to manage the patient transfers from one hospital to another [31].…”

“…In order to compare clinical and administrative data from different care facilities, a harmonization process is needed. The semantic harmonization process adopted here is similar to the one described in the terminology system within an Italian Electronic Health Record [39]. From a semantic point of view, national and international vocabularies have been adopted for coding the following information:…”

A NLP Pipeline for the Automatic Extraction of Microorganisms Names from Microbiological Notes

“…The non-contemporary and highly localized development of this type of systems led each center to create its own vocabulary for the coding of individual laboratory analyses. In order to make the results coming out of the single laboratories comparable, appropriate standard systems have been devised for the management of terminology, for example the Common Terminology Services re-lease 2 (CTS2) [2], whose specifications derive from the synergy between the Object Management Group (OMG) [3] and Health Level 7 (HL7) [4].…”