The Terminology Services Community was formally created in January, 2013 to address issues of data comparability and interoperability within the OHIE. The Terminology Services component serves as the central authority within OHIE to uniquely identify the clinical activities that occur within the care delivery process by holding the “official” representation of international standard terminologies such as such as ICD10, LOINC, SNOMED, and maintaining correspondences, or “maps”, between locally-used code sets/dictionaries and these reference standards.  The Terminology Service provides the “What?” in the OpenHIE architecture.

The Mission of the Terminology Services Community is to promote and support the effective capture, exchange (interoperability) and analysis (comparison and aggregation) of clinical information among components of the HIE. Our efforts include the documentation of principles, processes, interfaces and tools that support the mission.

Following identification of key stakeholder representatives to form the initial membership in the community, regular, bi-weekly, meetings have been held to further the community’s goals. Some of the key results of these meetings include:

• Appointment of Jack Bowie, Apelon, and Andy Kanter, Columbia and IMO , to serve as initial co-chairs.
• Demonstrations of representative Terminology Services software.
• Presentation of case studies of existing Terminology Services implementations such as that in Rwanda.
• Collaboration with other OHIE Communities such as the Facilities Registry team to identify best practices in implementation guides and the resulting development of an outline for our Terminology Services Planning and Implementation Guide.
• Identification of an experienced contractor to write an initial draft of the Guide, based on interviews with key Terminology Services Community members. Currently finalizing contracts with the writer and expect an initial draft by the end of the year. We will continue to work with the other OHIE communities to ensure consistency and synergy with their Guides.
• Other document deliverables including:
  • Terminology Services Glossary of Terms
  • Terminology Services Presumptions Document
  • Terminology Services Use Cases

During this “start-up” phase, the Community has benefitted significantly from the unique experiences of the members and members of other OHIE Communities. In the coming year, we plan to complete major deliverables such as the Planning and Implementation Guide and broaden member participation to include representatives from emerging OHIE installations.