Country / Region
EMEA
Tags
Collaboration, Global/International, Implementation
Semantic interoperability is a national priority in various countries, facilitating data exchange within healthcare ecosystems, particularly electronic medical records. Health terminology standards are essential for ensuring semantic interoperability, preserving the meaning of data, and enabling consistent interpretation across systems. Countries can adopt existing terminology standards that meet their specific needs or develop local standards to ensure interoperability and consistency. Terminology will evolve alongside the updates in medical knowledge and interoperability requirements. Effective terminology management is crucial for adapting to ongoing changes in health standards. Some countries have established governing bodies for terminology management; however, no guidelines or frameworks currently exist to support these bodies. Therefore, a scoping review was conducted from 35 selected articles to understand the scope, principles, challenges, pitfalls, and knowledge gaps in national-level terminology management.
Terminology management includes all activities related to terminology systems after their initial release, such as the development, management, and updating of content and change policy. Changes in terminology encompass the addition, inactivation, or obsolete marking, refinement, updates to existing content, and reactivation. This process involves collecting change proposals, validating them, conducting consensus-based reviews, verifying, managing versions, implementing changes, and publicising them. Terminology management must consider principles like stakeholder communication, openness, responsiveness to feedback, and unique processes tailored to each organisation. A national body for terminology management is essential for coordinating and collaborating with multidisciplinary stakeholders. The lack of a formal methodology, combined with the complex, resource-intensive, and ongoing nature of staff changes, presents a challenge for implementing terminology management.
Description
The scoping review focuses on exploring and mapping the current knowledge of terminology management at the national level, drawing on existing literature, including research articles, protocols, guidelines, policies, and other grey literature. It aims to understand the scope, principles, challenges, common pitfalls, and knowledge gaps associated with terminology management by national governing bodies. A systematic literature search was conducted using targeted keywords across journal articles, conference proceedings, books, and grey literature. The literature from the search results was then assessed for eligibility using inclusion and exclusion criteria. Thirty-five selected articles were extracted to compile information about the research questions, and a basic qualitative analysis was conducted to synthesise the results and answer those questions.
Scope
SNOMED CT was chosen for this research because it is the most comprehensive terminology available globally and has clear and transparent documentation regarding its management. Additionally, SNOMED International provides numerous guidelines and learning materials on the principles and practical steps for member countries to manage their terminology products, including extensions, subsets, reference sets, and translations. This aligns with the study's aim to explore and synthesise the scope and principles of terminology management conducted by the national governing body. By examining literature related to SNOMED CT, the review gains insight into high-impact practices and common considerations relevant to terminology management on a national scale.
How SNOMED CT will be used
SNOMED CT, as the most comprehensive health terminology standard in the world, has become one of the leading terminology standards, with a substantial body of existing literature on SNOMED CT implementation and terminology management. SNOMED International, as one of the Standard Developing Organisations (SDOS), has published numerous guidelines and learning materials on implementing or adopting SNOMED CT, as well as on how member countries or implementers manage their extensions, reference sets, subsets, and translations. These guidelines provide the principles for managing terminology products and outline practical steps for governing them. Therefore, these documents published by SNOMED International regarding SNOMED CT were included in the study to provide important knowledge on the scope, principles, challenges, and common pitfalls of terminology management at the national level.
Why SNOMED CT will be used
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