As healthcare undergoes a digital transformation, the data and content that supports patient care must align across organizations, systems, and nations. Oftentimes, there are government agencies charged with maintaining a shared national knowledge base to inform health and social care for its citizens. In one such agency, there is a team of data specialists and project managers who author, edit, and release national code sets.
These code sets are used by over 300 healthcare provider and research organizations to ensure standard health and social services, patient safety, and epidemiology documentation. The data is also used to develop standards and regulations, maintain health registries, and produce official statistics.
One challenge in maintaining accurate code sets is the amount of data agencies like these must ingest and maintain. Agencies receive source files from the World Health Organization, LOINC, SNOMED, and more depending on local requirements. The formats and terminologies within the source files vary significantly.
To provide its customers – health systems and research organizations – usable data within code sets, this agency needed a strong terminology management approach and solution. Through terminology management, content is localized and shared seamlessly across systems and organizations to ensure clinical data is understood. A clinician knows their patient is diabetic, regardless of venue, location, or system, because the entire nation uses standardized diagnostic codes.
The agency needed to invest in a technology solution to support their efforts, and they selected Rhapsody Semantic for terminology management, hosted and managed in the Rhapsody cloud. With this robust terminology management toolset at their fingertips, the agency has a single source of truth for standardized clinical data that is high-quality, understandable, and usable by other systems everywhere.
Automation within the Rhapsody Semantic solution alleviates the team’s manual work, freeing them to improve the metadata that supports statistical and medical research – benefiting society overall. Automation also reduces opportunities for error and accelerates the delivery of localized data to consumers.
The agency used Rhapsody Semantic to create a single source of truth for the national release of ICD-10 that spans from 1997 to the present. Researchers now use these data sets to track disease evolution and how medical and social outcomes have varied throughout the nation and over time. The team has capacity to experiment with ICD-11 in a test environment to understand the impact to care delivery, documentation, and registry.
This agency can now assemble more robust code sets of high-quality health data from a multitude of organizations and formats — and distribute that information to other agencies to improve how they deliver, document, and research healthcare throughout the country.
Contact us to find out how Rhapsody can help you automate more data processes and make sense of your data to solve your toughest challenges.
