Medinfo 1995;8 Pt 1:117-20

Managing vocabulary for a centralized clinical system.

Cimino JJ, Johnson SB, Hripcsak G, Hill CL, Clayton PD.

Department of Medical Informatics, Columbia University, New York, New York
10032, USA.

The clinical computing environment at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center is
organized around a centralized database of coded patient information collected
from various ancillary sources. The Medical Entities Dictionary (MED) is the
central repository for the controlled vocabulary used to encode the patient
data. The MED is composed of terms used in the ancillary departments and, as
such, changes in the source vocabularies must be maintained in the MED. The MED
also contains some basic knowledge about the terms, and sophisticated
maintenance tools have been developed that take advantage of this knowledge.
This paper describes the success of the knowledge-based approach by describing
the techniques used in two tasks: addition of a new vocabulary and maintenance
of an existing one.