Development of a Taxonomy for Health Information Technology

Taxonomies provide schemas to help classify entities and define the relationships between them. Early computing enabled the development of ontologies and Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), the first modern classification of medical terminology as applied to medical literature. Later developments, such as MEDLINE, expanded MeSH to include a number of medical informatics terms. However, a lack of specificity in MeSH and other existing informatics taxonomies for terminology used to describe the growing field of health information technology (health IT) created the need for the development of a specialized taxonomy. Experts associated with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQs) National Resource Center for Health Information Technology (NRC) created and evaluated a taxonomy for health IT, to enable users of a public health IT Web site to efficiently identify resources within an online, searchable repository.