toFHIR Features: Terminology Service
In the complex landscape of healthcare data, ensuring that different systems can communicate with each other is a significant challenge. Medical terminologies, with their vast and varied vocabularies, often become a barrier to data exchange. This is where terminology services become essential. In this blog post, we will explore the powerful terminology service feature within the toFHIR tool, demonstrating how it simplifies the handling of complex terminologies and code conversions in Electronic Health Record (EHR) ecosystems.
The Challenge of Medical Terminologies
EHR systems are rich with clinical information, but this data is often recorded using different terminologies and coding systems. For example, one system might use a local code to represent a specific lab test, while another uses a standardized code from a system like SNOMED CT. To make sense of this data and ensure it can be used for analytics, research, or clinical decision support, these different codes need to be mapped to a common standard.
Introducing the toFHIR Terminology Service
The toFHIR tool offers a comprehensive built-in terminology service designed to tackle these challenges head-on. It provides a centralized platform for managing and converting medical terminologies — data from various sources is accurately and consistently transformed into the FHIR standard.
Terminology service offers its solutions through two main definitions:
- Concept Map: A concept map defines the relationships between source codes (local terms) and target codes (standardized codes). It allows for the mapping of local terminologies to standardized ones, such as SNOMED CT.
- Code System: A code system is a collection of codes that represent concepts in a specific domain. It provides a way to resolve local identifiers to their corresponding human-readable descriptions.
Check out our blog post on the toFHIR website for a practical example of how this works.
