SMTS®: un serveur multiterminologies en santé

In the health sector, there exist practically as many different terminologies as there are fields of application. Hence, and given the growing need for cooperation between health players, a new “interoperable” terminology base is now required featuring a shared semantic frame of reference to enable the various terminologies to interact effectively. Three groups (LERTIM, CISMeF, and MONDECA) have set up a partnership designed to incorporate a dozen or so French-language terminologies into a single computer-based system capable of processing them simultaneously. In the first stage, we designed a model of the terminologies in question: CIM-10, CCAM, SNOMED 3.5, CISP, CIF, DRC, MeSH and CISMeF (an extension of MeSH). Once validated, this general model was merged with the ITM® model (MONDECA) for implementation. The result is an operational multiterminology server integrating homogeneously nine of the most frequently-used Frenchlanguage health-jield terminologies. The next stage is aimed to incorporate other Frenchlanguage terminologies & LOINC for laboratory data (as the French translation becomes available), the Orphanet terminology of rare diseases, and the unified drug thesaurus that the French medical publishing company Vidal SA is currently constructing.