Health Information Technology and Health Data Standards at NLM

NLM is the central coordinating body for clinical terminology standards within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). NLM works closely with the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) to ensure NLM's efforts are aligned with the goal of the President and HHS Secretary for the nationwide implementation of an interoperable health information technology infrastructure to improve the quality and efficiency of health care.

• Health Data Standards

  09/30/10 -- Public-Private Partnership for Standards: Kaiser Permanente Opens Access to Convergent Medical Terminology (CMT) to Support National Health IT Goals (press announcement, FAQ)

  NLM supports the development, enhancement, and distribution of clinically specific vocabularies to facilitate the exchange of clinical data and improve retrieval of health information.

  • Clinical Vocabularies supported, licensed, or developed by NLM:
    SNOMED CT | LOINC | RxNorm
  • Uniform distribution mechanism for HIPAA and clinical vocabulary standards through the UMLS Metathesaurus
  • SNOMED CT Subsets:
    • CORE Problem List Subset of SNOMED CT
    • UMLS Enhanced VA/KP Problem List Subset of SNOMED CT

  NLM distributes FDA approved Structured Product Labels linked to RxNorm and related medication information:

  • DailyMed

  NLM coordinates efforts to develop mappings between HIPAA code sets and standard clinical vocabularies.

  • SNOMED CT to ICD-9-CM | SNOMED CT to CPT | LOINC to CPT

  NLM promotes harmonization between standards.

  • Contract with HL7 to align HL7 message standard with CHI standard vocabularies and create implementation guides for exchange of entire EHRs.

• System Development Tools

  • UMLS Resources
  • Language and Knowledge Processing
  • Image Processing

• Grants and Funding

• Education and Training

  • Funded Support for Academic Training in Biomedical Informatics & Bioinformatics - Formal programs and individual fellowships are offered to assist medical informaticians in pursuit of a degree.
  • Medical Informatics Training Program - Support for visiting scientists and students to participate in research at the Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications. Medical Informatics Course at Woods Hole sponsored by NLM and the Woods Hole Marine Biology Laboratory.

• Key Reports Supported or Produced by NLM

  • Computational Technology for Effective Health Care: Immediate Steps and Strategic Directions (2009) Computer Science and Telecommunications Board. National Research Council of the National Academies. Commissioned and partially funded by NLM. (PDF*, 660KB)
  • Ending the Document Game (2005)
  • Networking Health: Prescriptions for the Internet (2000)
  • Evaluating the Coverage of Controlled Health Data Terminologies: Report on the Results of the NLM/AHCPR Large Scale Vocabulary Test (1997)
  • For the Record: Protecting Electronic Health Information (1997)
  • Making a Powerful Connection (1995)

*PDF documents require the use of the Adobe® Acrobat® Reader, which can be downloaded from the Adobe's Web site at no charge.

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