ISO DIS 17117-1

Description / Abstract: Main purpose

The characteristics of a terminology influence its utility and appropriateness in clinical applications. This International Standard defines universal and specialised characteristics of health terminological resources that make them fit for the purposes required of such systems. It refers only to terminological resources that are primarily designed to be used for clinical concept representation or to those parts of other terminological resources designed to be used for clinical concept representation.

Categorisation of healthcare terminological systems according to the name of the system may not be helpful and has caused confusion in the past. Section 4 and 5 below supports categorisation according to the characteristics and functions of the terminological resources rather than the name.

The main purpose of the entire revision work (both Part 1 and the following parts of 17117) enable users to assess whether a terminology has the characteristics or provides the functions that will support their specified requirements. The focus of this document (Part1) is to define characteristics and functions of terminological resources in healthcare that can be used to identify different types of them for categorization purpose, rather than according to the names. Requirements for, and evaluation criteria of, terminological resources in health care are described in the following parts of 17117, both of which are tightly related to the characteristics of terminological resources and functions that they can provide.

Target groups

The target groups for this International Standard are:

— organisations wishing to select terminological systems for use in healthcare information systems;

— developers of terminological systems;

— developers of terminology standards;

— those undertaking independent evaluations / academic reviews of terminological resources;

— terminology Registration Authorities.

Topics outside the scope

Both Part1: Characteristics and the following parts of 17117 do not provide evaluations of terminological resources but rather the general characteristics and criteria with which systems may be evaluated.

Health service requirements for terminological resources and evaluation criteria based on the characteristics and functions are described in the following parts of 17117, thus they are not addressed in this document.

It is unlikely that a single terminology will meet all the terminology requirements of a healthcare organisation: some terminology providers produce mappings to administrative or statistical classifications such as the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). The presence of such maps would be a consideration in the evaluation of the terminology but the nature and quality of mappings between different terminologies are not addressed in this document.

To support data migration and historical retrieval, terminology providers may provide maps between versions of their terminology. The presence of such maps would be a consideration in the evaluation of the terminology but the nature and quality of mappings between different versions of the same terminology are not addressed in this document.

Terminology server requirements and techniques and tools for terminology developers are out of scope of this International Standard.

Progress in medical science and in terminology science will necessitate updating of this standard in due course, for example, characteristics for computational biology terminology will need to be included in the future.