mlhim-owners team mailing list archive

[Tim Cook <timothywayne.cook@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,

Terminology Services are a necessary service for every implementation of
OSHIP and in fact for every healthcare related application.

Healthcare terminologies are extremely complex and varied. As can be
easily seen in just the few that we have as demos in OSHIPpy (see the
forth coming email; OSHIP Implementations).

Unfortunately there is no single API for terminologies/vocabularies. 

The closest thing we have is the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS)
developed by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The various content items in the UMLS have varying licenses that
determine how/when/where they can be used.  Fortunately, we are seeing
more and more openness with these.
 
The NIH is also creating a grid network and terminology service
(LexGrid/LexBIG) that is open source.  It originally had only a Java
API.  However they have now announced that it has a web service
interface.  I have been studying this recently and it looks to me to be
the solution that we need to deploy.  

This is also politically good for the OSHIP implementations because
visibility means funding.  We can become major users of this work from
the NIH and therefore we can contribute back implementation lessons,,
bug reports, etc. giving us that visibility. 

As an aside.  This is also why I included the CONNECT National Health
Information Network (NHIN) schemas as well as the Statistical
Data/Metadata Exchange - Health Domain (SDMX-HD) schemas as part of
OSHIP. These are purpose specific messaging schemas for the USA and for
WHO respectively.  In each case,, implementation of these with the MLHIM
specs will makes us more visible.

In the OSHIP implementation projects I would like for the project leads
(we are now recruiting a Java developer to lead OSHIPjava.  Is that
YOU?) to look towards using the NIH terminology services.  

Thank You,
Tim

UMLS: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/ 

LexBIG/LexGrid: https://wiki.nci.nih.gov/display/EVS/LexBIG+Terminology
+Server+and+LexGrid+Vocabulary
Services;jsessionid=2D55F028AD98E68340BD7D2371E510B7  

NHIN - CONNECT: http://www.connectopensource.org/ 

SDMX-HD: http://groups.google.com/group/sdmx_hd/web/introduction?pli=1 



-- 
***************************************************************
Timothy Cook, MSc
Project Lead - Multi-Level Healthcare Information Modeling
http://www.mlhim.org 

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