Interoperable health information exchange depends on adoption of terminology standards, but international use of such standards can be challenging because of language differences between local concept names and the standard terminology. To address this important barrier, we describe the evolution of an efficient process for constructing translations of LOINC terms names, the foreign language functions in RELMA, and the current state of translations in LOINC. We also present the development of the Italian translation to illustrate how translation is enabling adoption in international contexts. We built a tool that finds the unique list of LOINC Parts that make up a given set of LOINC terms. This list enables translation of smaller pieces like the core component “hepatitis c virus” separately from all the suffixes that could appear with it, such “Ab.IgG”, “DNA”, and “RNA”. We built another tool that generates a translation of a full LOINC name from all of these atomic pieces. As of version 2.36 (June 2011), LOINC terms have been translated into 9 languages from 15 linguistic variants other than its native English. The five largest linguistic variants have all used the Part-based translation mechanism. However, even with efficient tools and processes, translation of standard terminology is a complex undertaking. Two of the prominent linguistic challenges that translators have faced include: the approach to handling acronyms and abbreviations, and the differences in linguistic syntax (e.g. word order) between languages. LOINC’s open and customizable approach has enabled many different groups to create translations that met their needs and matched their resources. Distributing the standard and its many language translations at no cost worldwide accelerates LOINC adoption globally, and is an important enabler of interoperable health information exchange

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Controlled vocabularies and standardized coding systems play a fundamental role in the healthcare domain. The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is one of the most widely used classification systems for clinical problems and procedures. In Italy the 9 th revision of the standard is used and recommended in primary care for encoding prescription documents. This paper describes a statistical and terminological study to assess ICD-9-CM use in primary care and its comparison to the International Classification of Primary Care (ICPC), specifically designed for primary care. The study has been conducted by analyzing the clinical records of about 199,000 patients provided by a set of 166 General Practitioners (GPs) in different Italian areas. The analysis has been based on several techniques for detecting coding practice and errors, like natural language processing and text-similarity comparison. Results showed that the selected GPs do not fully exploit the diseases and procedures descriptive capabilities of ICD-9-CM due to its complexity. Furthermore, compared to ICPC-2, it resulted less feasible in the primary care setting, particularly for the high granularity of the structure and for the lack of reasons for encounters.

Objectives: The purpose of this paper is to present and discuss the adoption and use of medical terminologies and coding systems in Italy, focusing on their management and integration for guaranteeing semantic interoperability among Electronic Health Records (EHRs). Semantic interoperability guarantees meaningful exchange of data between two or more healthcare information systems, ensuring that data content is not only understandable within its original context, but also in the destination one, and is capable of supporting health service management, clinical decision-making care collaboration, as well as public health reporting, and improving clinical research. Methods: The approach used for the coding systems management and integration in the Italian Fascicolo Sanitario Elettronico (FSE) a use case is presented according to the current Italian regulations on federated EHRs. Results: Results show the need to promote an advanced approach, in conformance to the literature best cases, which takes care about a better integration and maintenance of medical terminologies and coding systems through the use of standardized models of terminology services. Conclusion: The paper presents terminology interoperability issues arisen from the described approach and related requirements to propose a solution that could allow, through sophisticated terminology services framework, to achieve also in Italy semantic interoperability.