Hi Folks This is a mail I have recieved from a Nursing Informatics Colleauge of mine on another list. I think you will be particularly interested in paragraph one. (my apologies if this old news _I don't think it is) regards
Chris Fraser At the WG3 Health Concept Representation meeting held yesterday Dr Chris Chute informed us that the two and a half year negotiations between the US Government and SNOMED were now discontinued. These parties had not been able to reach a satisfactory agreement regarding the adoption of this proprietory reference terminology system. As a consequence Dr Ed Hammond, Stan Huff, Jim Cimino and Chris Chute had decided to devote 50% of their time to the development of an Open Health Terminology (OHT). Clem McDonald and Sue Bakken have agreed to participate and the Markle Foundation is making $1 million available to undertake this task. This group has established a not for profit corporation to manage this effort. This new terminology will be based on core content and open source editing/authoring tools publicly available. The underlying philosophy is that all health terminology needs to be standardised and freely available for widespread adoption worldwide in order to achieve true system interoperability. This initiative is in the early stages, it is expected that experts from other countries will be able to contribute as participating members in due course. Also the ISO Nursing Reference Terminology Model project has been accepted by all member countries with one abstention. The Australian team will be leading the development of a discussion paper towards putting forward another new work item addressing the problem of integrating/combining information models with terminologies which is of particular relevance to terminology expressions of clinical data. We need to overcome the problem of the adoption of many clinical data sets that do not link to any particular terminology nor do they have characteristics that facilitate the best possible use of available technologies. This is potentially dangerous when such data sets are used in decision support systems. Various ISO TC215 working groups have also come to the conclusion that we need to have joint meetings to avoid the potential of overlap of work being undertaking by the five working groups, health records and modelling, health record archiving, directory access, security and data protection, messaging and communication, health concept representation and health cards. For the last year we have had several ad-hoc groups examining consumer, mobile health, e-pharmacy, web application and EHR issues. These groups will report at tomorrow's plenary meeting and then be disbanded. The ISO technical committee will decide how best to move forward in the light of these ad-hoc group recommendations. Evelyn A/Prof Evelyn J.S. Hovenga RN PhD FCHSE FRCNA MACS Program Director, Health Informatics Faculty of Informatics and Communication Central Queensland University Rockhampton MC Qld 4702 Australia
