Terminology Server

 

Code Systems

Terminology Service by John Snow Labs

In healthcare, medical coding systems are standardized sets of codes used to classify diseases, treatments, medications, lab results, and clinical concepts. Each system serves a specific purpose:

  • ICD10: Classifies diseases and health conditions.
  • CPT4: Used to describe medical procedures and services.
  • LOINC: Codes for lab tests and clinical measurements.
  • RxNorm: Normalized names for drugs and medications.
  • SNOMED CT: A comprehensive system for clinical terms used in electronic health records.
  • UMLS: A unifying system that connects terms across multiple vocabularies.
  • MeSH: Medical subject headings used in biomedical literature indexing.

Each system uses codes (e.g., E11 for Type 2 Diabetes in ICD10) to represent a specific medical concept.

Different healthcare roles and use cases require different systems:

  • A physician documents diagnoses using ICD10.
  • A lab uses LOINC to record test results.
  • A pharmacist references RxNorm to prescribe medications.
  • A clinical researcher might use MeSH to search publications.

This diversity improves accuracy and efficiency within each domain—but it also creates fragmentation.

⚠️ The Challenge

When data is spread across different coding systems, it becomes difficult to:

  • Exchange information across systems or institutions.
  • Analyze data uniformly.
  • Integrate clinical and administrative workflows.

For example, one system may document a condition as “Essential Hypertension” (SNOMED), while another uses the ICD10 code I10.

✅ The Solution: Search and Map Across Systems Terminology Server application solves this problem by:

  • Letting users search for medical concepts (e.g., “diabetes,” “hypertension”) across multiple systems at once.
  • Returning the corresponding codes in each system.
  • Showing mappings—links between equivalent or related codes across systems.

This means users can see - as exemplified in the top image, how E11 in ICD10 (Type 2 diabetes) maps to 10067585 in MEDDRA_PT( standardized, single medical concepts used to represent a symptom, sign, disease, diagnosis, etc) and how to E11 in ICD10CM (coding diseases, conditions, and injuries for statistical and billing purposes) maps to C0011847 in UMLS.

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