The Health & Human Services Department will make available to vendors and providers starting in early November software developed by Kaiser Permanente that translates physicians' use of diagnostic and other medical terms into standard data formats that can be shared via electronic health record systems.
Kaiser Permanente has made the technology, called Convergent Medical Terminology (CMT) available at no cost. CMT automatically translates "clinician and patient friendly" terms into standard data, making it easier for providers to move from paper to electronic health records (EHRs) systems.
Dr. David Blumenthal, the national coordinator for health IT, said at a briefing Sept. 29 that the move would foster the use of consistent data formats across systems and institutions.
Blumenthal said that Kaiser's donation addresses, "not only a technical issue but a human issue, which is the difficulty in understanding all this complicated terminology that we use in medicine so that people in their daily work can use it."
The CMT software solves a problem that every doctor faces every day, he added. "We want our patients to have information about what we're doing, but we don't want the medical terminology to be misunderstood, not understood at all, or alarming if unnecessary," Blumenthal said, adding, "It's like a continuous translation between different languages."
Kaiser donated the software to the International Healthcare Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO), which owns the standard for SNO-MED-CT, the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms.
CMT incorporates SNOWMED-CT tools, said Phil Fasano, CIO of Kaiser Permanente. CMT will be distributed in the United States through HHS' National Library of Medicine.
"The magic of CMT happens on the backend of our electronic health record system so our physicians don't have to spend time thinking about terminology and coding," Fasano said.
Dr. Susan Matcha, a Washington D.C.-based Kaiser Permanente infectious disease specialist, explained how CMT works. If a physician types in "htn" as a hypertension diagnosis code, "when the patient logs on to their version of the EHR, what they will see is the word hypertension, a patient friendly version of the diagnosis," she said.
Betsy Humphreys, deputy director of the National Library of Medicine, said that the CMT will become available via the Internet shortly after IHTSDO transmits it to NLM. "Essentially, the price of admission is you execute quickly a free license agreement over the Web," she said.
The Kaiser offering will also remove hurdles to technology innovations in the health care marketplace, officials said. All EHR vendors have to find a way to take the standardized medical terminologies and "translate them into English that doctors and patients can understand," Blumenthal said.
"At a minimum [CMT] will make it easier for new competitors with one less thing they have to solve for themselves for easier access to the market. If we're lucky, it will become a standard way with which all the vendors can solve that problem," he said.
