Leveraging SNOMED and ICD-9 cross mapping for semantic interoperability at a RHIO

The HEAL10-NY grant, funded by the New York State Government, is an outcome of the state’s effort to integrate hospitals, clinics and laboratories in New York. This paper discusses the mapping strategies adopted for the semantic and process interoperability between two hospital systems that have been implemented at two different clinical settings using standard vocabularies. Allscripts EMR is being used at ante/prenatal clinics to document ante/prenatal care and General Electricity’s Centricity Perinatal (CPN) is being used at labor and delivery units in the hospital. Both applications differ in their content usage, software/hardware architectures, and platforms. Clinical information from these prenatal clinics/hospitals is transmitted after every visit to the RHIO, which acts as a clinical data repository and an aggregator of clinical information. At the time of admission for labor and delivery, the aggregated data is pushed to the inpatient labor and delivery system. This paper describes the usage of the recursive functions to traverse the SNOMED hierarchies to match the granularity levels of the Allscripts EMR application as well as SNOMED ICD-9 crosswalk tables.