title: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Enterprise Reference Terminology strategic overview.
abstract: The Veterans Health Affairs (VHA) branch of the Department of Veterans Affairs has undertaken an Enterprise Reference Terminology (ERT). VHA, arguably the largest integrated healthcare provider in the United States, has completely computerized virtually all clinical transactions, including physician orders and documentation. The VA is now integrating its clinical records across hundreds of sites of care by means of a Health Data Repository (HDR) project. ERT has been designed to provide a terminology development environment, terminology services, and maintenance services for the clinical and business content in HDR and other VHA applications. Drug, laboratory observations, and clinical document title files have been developed, and the ERT will encompass all HDR domains by 2008. Commercial tools are used to host the VHA's ERT terminology development and server environments. We will select and adopt both open-source and licensable terminology systems to provide ERT content, as well as reuse existing VA-specific terminology content.
authors.affiliation: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs OI Field Office, VA Medical Center, Salt Lake City, UT 84148, USA. michael.lincoln@med.va.gov
authors.forename: Michael J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Lincoln
authors.forename: Steven H
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: Brown
authors.forename: Viet
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Nguyen
authors.forename: Tim
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Cromwell
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Carter
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Erlbaum
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Tuttle
mesh_terms: D006751:Hospital Information Systems; D008498:Medical Record Linkage; D016347:Medical Records Systems, Computerized / Q000145:classification*; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D014481:United States; D014493:United States Department of Veterans Affairs; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled