Standardization of disease names and development of an advanced clinical ontology

Abstract

Electronic medical records have been adopted gradually in many hospitals and they are becoming invaluable information resources for evidence-based clinical medicine. Standardized disease names should be recorded in such electronic medical records for advanced analyses for clinical researches and the standard master of controlled terms was developed and released in 2002. In the master, only one disease name label for a disease concept is defined as the standard name and there are no semantic relationships among the concepts. Now the authors are developing an advanced clinical ontology based on the policy that diseases could be defined by a combination of a focused disordered condition and partial causal chain of related conditions including the focus. In this paper, the standard master and the advanced clinical ontology will be introduced.