1 Healthcare Information Interchange through Shared Ontologies Ram Sriram Manager, Manufacturing Metrology and Standards for the Healthcare Enterprise

2 Terminology/Ontologies as Crucial Requirement Without Terminology Standards... Health Data is non-comparable Health Systems cannot Interchange Data Secondary Uses (Research, Efficiency) are not possible Linkage to Decision Support Resources not Possible Courtesy: C. Chute

3 ICD-9-CM Resolution? 185 Malignant neoplasm of prostate True for Men with widely metastasic disease True for Men with clinically indolent disease discovered at TURP Should we base national policy decisions on data that cannot distinguish between lethal and indolent disease forms? Mortality based coding system precludes interest in “how badly dead” you are. Courtesy: C. Chute

4 NIST’s Interests in Clinical Informatics: Focus Areas  Electronic Medical Records  Vocabularies  Evidence-based Medicine Courtesy: C. Chute

5 NIST’s Interests in Clinical Informatics: Approaches Systems engineering techniques  Mapping requirements to an appropriate architecture. Languages for expressing semantics  UML,OWL,PSL, etc. Test-beds for assessing interoperability and conformance  HL7 Conformance Testing (Lisa Carnahan, ITL)  Metrics  Measuring and characterizing information  Expressiveness and computability Courtesy: C. Chute

6 Customer Need and Anticipated Impact: Healthcare cost keeps increasing while quality remains a problem (unacceptable errors, dissatisfied patients & payers)  Many barriers to the interchange of healthcare information “Standardized health care information exchange among health care IT systems would deliver national savings of $77.8 billion dollars every year” [  MEL's Healthcare Strategic Focus Area study (Aug.2005) identified 39 standards, SDOs, vocabularies and ontologies in the clinical information arena  Need for coordination and harmonization and an overall conceptual framework to improve interoperability Clinical Informatics Project Objective : Extrapolate from MEL’s experience in information modeling and research supporting information interchange standards development for the manufacturing industry to provide experience, assistance and leadership for related activities in the health care informatics field. Deliverables 1.Publish a report of clinical information standards, SDOs, healthcare vocabularies and ontologies. [2005] 2.Publish a report on semantic consistency enforcement and semantic translation techniques and develop pilot implementations of promising techniques. [2006] 3.Develop a prototype clinical informatics knowledge library and use it to populate a prototype medical information system. [2007] 4.Develop a reference architecture for CI. [2008] 5.Develop test methods and testbeds..