Proposal of Standardization of Medical Terminology for Exchange and Sharing of Medical Information

Abstract

 Several methods have been proposed which enable healthcare providers to share and exchange medical information. Most of them, however, refer to specifications about protocols and the standardization of medical terminology has been fairly under way of carrying on. It must be essential and urgent task to standardize medical terminology both for developing electronic medical record systems and for exchanging clinical data electronically. Against this background, strenuous efforts have been done for compiling a standard lexicon that can be utilized commonly among all the medical providers. It would rather be a practical solution to unify terminology in terms of standardized medical concept in a manner that allows medical providers to represent medical terminology freely to some extent according to their application. Thus the author proposes a method of exchanging medical terminology between medical providers by means of standardized concept combined with proprietary terminology. The availability of this method is evaluated from the viewpoint of information sharing through the adoption to MERIT-9 patient data referral and MML standard.