Abstract
BackgroundEven though several high-quality clinical terminologies, such as SNOMED CT and LOINC, are readily available, uptake in clinical systems has been slow and many continue to capture information in plain text or using custom terminologies. This paper discusses some of the challenges behind this slow uptake and describes a clinical terminology server implementation that aims to overcome these obstacles and contribute to the widespread adoption of standardised clinical terminologies.ResultsOntoserver is a clinical terminology server based on the Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard. Some of its key features include: out-of-the-box support for SNOMED CT, LOINC and OWL ontologies, such as the Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO); a fast, prefix-based search algorithm to ensure users can easily find content and are not discouraged from entering coded data; a syndication mechanism to facilitate keeping terminologies up to date; and a full implementation of SNOMED CT’s Expression Constraint Language (ECL), which enables sophisticated data analytics.ConclusionsOntoserver has been designed to overcome some of the challenges that have hindered adoption of standardised clinical terminologies and is used in several organisations throughout Australia. Increasing adoption is an important goal because it will help improve the quality of clinical data, which can lead to better clinical decision support and ultimately to better patient outcomes.
Highlights
Even though several high-quality clinical terminologies, such as SNOMED CT and LOINC, are readily available, uptake in clinical systems has been slow and many continue to capture information in plain text or using custom terminologies
In this paper we describe Ontoserver [4], a clinical terminology server based on the HL7’s Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard, which was designed to overcome the challenges mentioned before and contribute to the widespread adoption of clinical terminology
We refer the readers to our VSTool, available at https:// ontoserver.csiro.au/vstool/, which allows doing interactive searches across different FHIR terminology servers and looking both at the results returned as well as the response times
Summary
Ontoserver is a clinical terminology server based on the Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard. Some of its key features include: out-of-the-box support for SNOMED CT, LOINC and OWL ontologies, such as the Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO); a fast, prefix-based search algorithm to ensure users can find content and are not discouraged from entering coded data; a syndication mechanism to facilitate keeping terminologies up to date; and a full implementation of SNOMED CT’s Expression Constraint Language (ECL), which enables sophisticated data analytics
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