Development, dissemination, and applications of a new terminological resource, the Q-Code taxonomy for professional aspects of general practice/family medicine

AbstractBackground: While documentation of clinical aspects of General Practice/Family Medicine (GP/FM) is assured by the International Classification of Primary Care (ICPC), there is no taxonomy for the professional aspects (context and management) of GP/FM.Objectives: To present the development, dissemination, applications, and resulting face validity of the Q-Codes taxonomy specifically designed to describe contextual features of GP/FM, proposed as an extension to the ICPC.Development: The Q-Codes taxonomy was developed from Lamberts’ seminal idea for indexing contextual content (1987) by a multi-disciplinary team of knowledge engineers, linguists and general practitioners, through a qualitative and iterative analysis of 1702 abstracts from six GP/FM conferences using Atlas.ti software. A total of 182 concepts, called Q-Codes, representing professional aspects of GP/FM were identified and organized in a taxonomy.Dissemination: The taxonomy is published as an online terminological resource, using semant...