>Your mention of UMLS CUI's makes GEHR seem much more interesting to me.
I second this.
Also, it draws attention to the fact that the UMLS, which is funded by the
National Library of Medicine (US), is captive to the many proprietary
vocabularies that go into the UMLS. In other words, it is not GEHR's
problem, it is a national (US) problem that no one wishes to address. To
the extent that we wish to use standardized vocabularies here at Stony
Brook, we will attempt to use UMLS.
All of which brings us to HIPPA, which has just been approved by the Bush
administration. HIPPA insists on the use of only a very few coding systems
(4 I believe), two of which are ICD-9 and CPT-4, the latter being proprietary.
So, the situation at the present time is that the US government thinks
nothing of mandating a proprietary coding system.
John
