title: Clinical terminology support for a national ambulatory practice outcomes research network.
abstract: The Medical Quality Improvement Consortium (MQIC) is a nationwide collaboration of 74 healthcare delivery systems, consisting of 3755 clinicians, who contribute de-identified clinical data from the same commercial electronic medical record (EMR) for quality reporting, outcomes research and clinical research in public health and practice benchmarking. Despite the existence of a common, centrally-managed, shared terminology for core concepts (medications, problem lists, observation names), a substantial "back-end" information management process is required to ensure terminology and data harmonization for creating multi-facility clinically-acceptable queries and comparable results. We describe the information architecture created to support terminology harmonization across this data-sharing consortium and discuss the implications for large scale data sharing envisioned by proponents for the national adoption of ambulatory EMR systems.
authors.affiliation: GE Healthcare Technologies, Waukesha, Wisconsin, USA. Tom.Ricciardi@med.ge.com
authors.forename: Thomas N
authors.initials: TN
authors.lastname: Ricciardi
authors.forename: Michael I
authors.initials: MI
authors.lastname: Lieberman
authors.forename: Michael G
authors.initials: MG
authors.lastname: Kahn
authors.forename: F E
authors.initials: FE
authors.lastname: Masarie
mesh_terms: D000555:Ambulatory Care Information Systems / Q000592:standards*; D003628:Database Management Systems; D019992:Databases as Topic; D006801:Humans; D007253:Information Centers; D019451:Information Management; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods / Q000592:standards; D008498:Medical Record Linkage / Q000379:methods / Q000592:standards*; D016347:Medical Records Systems, Computerized; D011785:Quality Assurance, Health Care; D009626:Terminology as Topic; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled