Mapping of Terminology Standards - A Way for Interoperability

Standards in medicine are essential to enable communication between healthcare providers. These standards can be used either for exchanging information, or for coding and documenting the health status of a patient. In this position paper we focus on the latter, namely terminology standards. However, the multidisciplinary field of medicine makes use of many different standards. We propose to invest in an interoperable electronic health record (EHR) that can be understood by all different levels of health care providers independent of the kind of terminology standard they use. To make this record interoperable, we suggest mapping standards in order to make uniform communication possible. We suggest using mappings between a reference terminology (RT) and other terminology standards. By using this approach we limit the number of mappings that have to be provided. The Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine, Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) can be used as a RT, because of its extensive character and the preserved semantics towards other terminology standards. Moreover, a lot of mappings from SNOMED CT to other standards are already defined previously.