Terminologies

Healthcare uses many standard terminologies, such as:

• SNOMED CT® – Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terminology – from the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO)
• LOINC® – Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes – from the Regenstrief Institute, Inc.
• RxNorm – from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) Unified Medical Language System (UMLS)
• ICD-10-CM – International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Clinical Modification – from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS)
• ICD-10-PCS – ICD-10-Procedure Coding System – from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS)
• CPT® – Current Procedural Terminology – from the American Medical Association (AMA)

Each terminology has its own release schedule and format. The 3M HDD serves as a single source of terminologies, offloading the update and management effort from you. In addition, versioning capabilities are provided to manage current and multiple historical versions of these code systems concurrently. Your organization's custom terminologies can also be integrated into the HDD with cross referencing to the standards.

Value Sets

A value set is a collection of codes from one or more terminologies, selected for a specific application or use case. An example would be an approved list of medications for a particular diagnosis.

The 3M HDD contains the standard value sets used in measures such as MU, and you can also create and manage custom value sets for your applications. Versioning of value sets is supported to ensure interoperability between applications that may be using different releases. The 3M HDD takes care of managing and updating value sets so you can focus on using them in your organization to drive value from your data.

Map Sets

A map set does not simply merge two terminologies. Instead, it is a unidirectional mapping from a source to a target terminology using a specified relationship type – and it can be complex. Different requirements could produce different map sets even between the same two terminologies. Some use cases are particularly difficult, such as requiring an equivalent map for all codes in the source terminology.

Standard terminologies have provided some starter sets, such as SNOMED CT to ICD-10-CM from the NLM. The 3M HDD contains these starter map sets but also extends them according to your needs, and new, specific map sets can be developed and maintained for your organization. Our versioning ability allows the seamless management of different terminology releases – as well as multiple versions of the map sets – to support interoperability between organizations and applications.