Terminology Services Connectathon in Australia

Dec 8, 2015

This is out today:

Adoption and use of clinical terminology in Australia has received a major boost with the signing of a licensing agreement between the CSIRO and the National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) to grant users within Australia free access to a comprehensive suite of tools to support browsing, authoring, mapping, maintaining, and querying terminology.

These tools will be invaluable for implementers of clinical terminology to move towards unified clinical coding and improved patient safety.

  • NEHTA’s LINGO™ enables users to author local extensions to SNOMED CT-AU using the same robust browser-based authoring tool used by the National Clinical Terminology Service.
  • CSIRO’s Ontoserver is a terminology server that provides a sophisticated means of querying, searching, filtering and ranking SNOMED CT-AU and other standard clinical terminologies including an application programming interface (API) that allows for quick and easy way for implementers to add SNOMED CT based data capture fields to their system.
  • CSIRO’s Snapper is backed by Ontoserver and enables users to create local data sub-sets and maps. “This licensing agreement between NEHTA and CSIRO enables both the private and public health sectors in Australia to access these tools to support the use and maintenance of terminology products. This will significantly improve the implementation and management of clinical data for enhanced patient outcomes,” said NEHTA CEO Peter Fleming.

The licensing agreement and national implementation will enable NEHTA to establish a fully syndicated terminology service providing national support for the re-use of locally-built reference sets, simple portal-based access to terminology products, and simplified maintenance processes to cascade SNOMED CT-AU updates into other products and support improved vendor testing processes.

I think that this is a great step forward for healthcare applications in Australia; laying down a solid terminology infrastructure is a real opportunity for us to improve healthcare applications around the country, though it will take some time for the application providers to figure out how to use it well, and then to start to make use of the powerful possibilities it offers.

The press release goes on to say:

NEHTA invites all interested to participate in a series of three Connectathons, with the first scheduled for February 2016.

Here’s some additional provisional details about the first connectathon:

  • It’s planned to be in Brisbane Feb 10/11
  • It’ll be held in association with HL7 Australia, and in addition to the CSIRO Ontoserver, the HL7 Australia Terminology Server will be part of the connectathon. Other terminology services may also be represented
  • Attendance is open to any software development team that produces healthcare applications that run in Australia (ISVs, jurisdictions, etc)
  • The technical focus will be the ValueSet and Concept Map resources, and the Value Set Expansion, Validation, and Translation operations
  • I don’t think there’ll be any charge for attending the connectathon

The connectathons are a key opportunity for vendors - large and small - to learn

  • what terminology services can do
  • what deployable terminology service solutions exist, including open source ones
  • why making use of them will be a key strategic requirement to make their customers happy and keep up with the market

Note that the connectathon details are still subject to change.