Ontologies Put More Meaning into Meaningful Use

The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, enacted as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, positioned the Meaningful Use of interoperable Electronic Health Records as a critical goal and encouraged nationwide EHR adoption. The Consolidated Health Informatics (CHI) initiative recommended the following three terminologies for EHRs: SNOMED CT, LOINC, and RxNorm to meet the Meaningful Use objectives. All three are integrated within the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), designed and maintained by the US National Library of Medicine. The Clinical Informatics team at the Medical College Wisconsin is developing ClinMynEHR, a clinical data portal created to annotate EHRs for selected pediatric patients treated at the Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin. Data for the system consists of many clinical and referral documents the patients have accumulated along their clinical odysseys. ClinMynEHR consists of a comprehensive clinical database, query and reporting tools, and incorporates phenotypes, clinical measurements, lab test results, medications and other clinical information standardized through Meaningful Use ontologies integrated within the UMLS.