ARDC Health and Medical Terminology Service
Creators: name: Boyle, Douglas
name: Ward, Roger
Publisher: name: ARDC
Year: 2023
Subjects: terminologies
vocabularies
semantic

description: Background
The secondary use of information obtained from medical records is witnessing a significant increase worldwide, particularly in Australia. This growing practice has the potential to reveal intricate relationships between individuals, medical conditions, and pharmaceutical interventions. Its widespread adoption is fueled by the development and implementation of common data models, along with technologies such as pseudonymisation and data linkage, which offer a balance between data privacy and usability.
A significant impediment to widespread adoption is that a considerable proportion of terms in Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems are not systematically mapped to standard medical vocabularies such as SNOMED CT or ICD-11. Consequently, there is an essential need to translate coded and free text into these standardized medical vocabularies both accurately and efficiently. Additionally, there is a growing demand to share these mapping data between various research groups, as this collaborative effort could potentially expedite the adoption process.
In alignment with this need, an extension of the Research Vocabularies Australia (RVA) service at the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) is being developed. This enhancement aims to foster the application of standard health terminologies and mappings within the Australian research community, thereby promoting data interoperability for both research and health service partners. The ARDC are working with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) leveraging existing national tools and capabilities, namely Ontoserver (curates the provision of SNOMED-CT AU and mappings to it) and Snap to Snomed (helps implement new mappings to Snomed), to build a secure platform for this important service. The Australian Health Research Alliance (AHRA) is supporting the delivery of this capability across our national community via the AHRA Transformational Data Collaboratiion (AHRA TDC) led by The University of Melbourne. The Australian Health Research Alliance represents over 90% of researchers and 86% of acute hralthcare services across Australia
Methods
In order for this service to truly deliver value, it was crucial to engage with the community. To this end, we organized a workshop at Melbourne Connect at the University of Melbourne, complemented by an online component to broaden accessibility. Our invitation list was extensive and diverse, encompassing a wide range of stakeholders from the healthcare sector, government agencies, and research institutions. The use of communications pathways via the Australian Health Research Alliance greatly facilitated the broad recruitment. 
The valuable insights derived from this workshop led to the formation of the Research Terminologies Australia Advisory Panel. This body was constituted with the express purpose of ensuring our service consistently aligns with the evolving needs of users and effectively achieves its projected goals. Additionally, the panel plays a crucial role in influencing both the architectural and functional design aspects of the new service.
Our initial objective was to set up a version of Snap to Snomed at the ARDC, providing a solid foundation for our service. The secondary goal was to enhance the functionality beyond mapping to Snomed CT to allow mappings between any vocabularies. The initial use-case will be mapping free text and codes to the RxNorm drug vocabulary rather than mapping to SNOMED-CT.
Results
We have thoroughly outlined the crucial business requirements and constructed an in-depth functional specification for our new service. Snap to Snomed (now called SnapAGoGo) has been seamlessly installed and is currently fully operational at the ARDC. This setup allows users to utilize their existing Australian institutional credentials for secure login to the service via the Australian Access Federation. Moreover, we have broadened the service's scope by integrating support for mapping to RxNorm, marking a significant enhancement in its functionality.
Conclusions
The new service will function as an indispensable tool in the generation and preservation of mappings, translating free-text data into established terminologies, with an initial emphasis on the Snomed CT and RxNorm vocabularies. Our future vision for this service is to establish it as the foremost destination for mapping, serving as a trusted repository of information that guides users in selecting the most appropriate vocabularies for a wide array of use cases.
Acknowledgements.
Funding was provided to this project by the ARDC