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Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer Application in Medical Care logoLink to Proceedings of the Annual Symposium on Computer Application in Medical Care
. 1989 Nov 8:513–518.

Designing an Introspective, Multipurpose, Controlled Medical Vocabulary

James J Cimino, George Hripcsak, Stephen B Johnson, Paul D Clayton
PMCID: PMC2245774

Abstract

The medical vocabulary used in clinical information systems must be more than a simple list of terms. We argue that such a vocabulary must have synonymy, domain completeness and multiple classifications, providing consistent views and explicit relationships, while remaining unambiguous and non-redundant. We examine the abilities of existing controlled vocabularies (ICD9-CM, SNOMED, MeSH, CMIT, CPT4, COSTAR, HELP, DXPLAIN, and UMLS) to meet these goals and propose an enhanced vocabulary structure based on a directed, acyclic semantic net. This structure provides a representation which permits introspection by the vocabulary maintenance system responsible for providing a terminology which meets our seven requirements. The vocabulary, which we refer to as the Medical Entities Dictionary, will serve a variety of applications.

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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