In the Healthcare domain taxonomies or classifications and above all coding systems are fundamental for the "unique identification" of relevant clinical data in critical situations and emergencies. Medical coding systems are generally used: (i) to classify diseases and other clinical data unambiguously; (ii) to support epidemiological studies; (iii) to index and retrieve information of interest. General research activities performed in this area are:
o Knowledge acquisition, terminology extraction and knowledge modelling applied to the development of specialized thesauri (e.g. for chronic diseases, for rare diseases)[1,3], consumer-oriented lexicons (e.g. to ease the access to healthcare information and clinical data), classification systems and ontologies.
o Digitization, Data Collection, Indexing of clinical documents (e.g. clinical reports, discharge letters, prescriptions) and Data Analysis, to allow physicians and stakeholders accessibility to and processing of relevant documents to ease the diagnostic process, define risk profiles, and to ease statistical and epidemiological studies.
Specific activities on coding systems concern the development of methodologies, services and products in the field of management, representation and integration of coding systems and medical terminologies used in the domain of primary and secondary care (e.g. ICD-9-CM, ICD-10, LOINC, ICPC-2, SNOMED-CT) [4,5,6,7]. These activities also include training on the coding of healthcare data. Other activities are related to Semantic Interoperability in Healthcare, in particular for what concern the integration of international classification or coding systems and end-user terminologies used in the different healthcare information systems and by different types of users (general practitioners, specialists, nurses, patients, etc.)[2]. Regarding this topic, IIT UOS is participating as external expert in the EU NoE project "Semantic Health Net".
IIT UOS Rende has been a partner in the Federated Electronic Health Record (Fascicolo Sanitario Elettronico - FSE) projects since 2009 and it is an active collaborator of AgiD (Agenzia per l'Italia Digitale) and the eHealth permanent Board of the Regions and the Autonomous Provinces (Tavolo Permanente della Sanità Elettronica delle Regioni e delle Province Autonome - TSE) in the definition of policies and recommendations on EHR and specifically on the use of coding systems. IIT UOS Rende is also the Italian representative of LOINC® (Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes)
References
[1] Elena Cardillo, Maria Teresa Chiaravalloti, Erika Pasceri.Technical report D10.4a/b- Subset di terminologia specialistica inerente le malattie rare e croniche invalidanti e Thesaurus delle malattie rare e malattie croniche invalidanti. (2014)
[2] Marc Jamoulle, Elena Cardillo, Joseph Roumier, Maxime Warnier, Robert Vander Stichele Mapping French terms in a Belgian guideline on heart failure to international classifications and nomenclatures: the devil is in the detail, 2014, Informatics In Primary Care.
[3] Erika Pasceri. Strutture tassonomiche e linguaggi specialistici in ambito biomedico (2014)
[4] Roberto Guarasci, Erika Pasceri, Maria Teresa Chiaravalloti, Vincenzo Lagani, Roberto Trunfio. A Coding Support System for the ICD-9-CM standard, ICHI 2014 - IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (2014)
[5] Maria Teresa Chiaravalloti, Erika Pasceri , Roberto Trunfio. Rapporto di ricerca circa l'utilizzo di terminologie di dominio standardizzate, problematiche e necessità del linguaggio da utilizzare in fase di prescrizione in relazione alle caratteristiche dei principali sistema di codifica di settore (2014)
[6] Elena Cardillo Formalizzazione ontologica di terminologie e sistemi di classificazione in ambito biomedico: il caso ICPC2-ICD10 (2013).
[7] E. Cardillo, E. Pasceri, Terminologie e sistemi di classificazione medica a supporto del Fascicolo Sanitario Elettronico, in: M.T. Guaglianone, I. Florio (eds.), Il Fascicolo Sanitario Elettronico: infrastruttura tecnologica e codifica dei dati, (Documentalia), Roma, CNR - SeGID, 2012, pp. 129 -160.
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