Current Status and Challenge of the Japanese Standard Disease Master
- Author:
Kazuhiko OHE
- Publication Type:Journal Article
- Keywords:
standardization;
disease master;
electronic patient lecord;
health care information;
ontology
- From:Kampo Medicine
2010;61(2):203-212
- CountryJapan
- Language:Japanese
-
Abstract:
Standardization of health care information is one of the major tasks for national IT strategies in Japan. In health care domain, because disease information is important, assigning one unique code to one disease concept is an essential requirement for reliable information processing of disease information, as well as standardization by assigning one unique disease name to one disease concept. The Japanese Standard Disease Master was developed to contribute on this purpose. The Committee for Controlled Medical Terminology of Japanese Association of Medical Sciences is responsible for standardizing disease names, and another committee dedicated for assigning codes to the disease names is set up in the Social Insurance Medical Fee Payment Fund together with Medical Information System Development Center. The first version of the master was released in July 2002,and the maintenances are continued to update four times a year according to various users' requirements received. The master contains about 22,000 terms and 2,000 modifiers. However, it is getting difficult to cover all of the disease descriptions for various clinical settings, and the author believes that a new framework of building ontology-based clinical concept database and an application of the database.
