Terminology, Governance, Interoperability: Meeting The Toughest Challenges Of Healthcare IT

Terminology is core to everything in healthcare—from diagnoses to procedures to outcomes, healthcare IT systems represent clinical concepts in coded terminologies or free text. The lack of a common clinical vocabulary across disparate systems is a primary roadblock to the national efforts to increase interoperability, transparency, and collaboration within our healthcare system.

As federal regulatory initiatives continue to encourage information-sharing capabilities inside and outside a healthcare organization, an Enterprise Terminology Management strategy is increasingly critical to success. Forward-thinking initiatives such as Accountable Care Organizations, quality improvement, health information exchange, analytics, and population health management all require that terminology content be standardized to eliminate semantic ambiguity.