One of the most significant challenges for modern healthcare facilities is achieving interoperability between service providers, pharmacies, and insurers. There has been a sharp rise in the digitization of medical information and other patient details, with over 90% of American hospitals now using electronic healthcare record (EHR) systems. While this aspect of digital transformation offers many benefits to both patients and medical personnel, ensuring these electronic systems can communicate with each other is a persistent obstacle to efficient communication. The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) has been the primary way of achieving this for several decades and is now used across app development, medical databases, and more.
Understanding the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS)
The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) encourages the use of common terms, coding standards, and medical resources to help ensure interoperability between different healthcare services and their computer systems.
This massive compendium of biomedical and healthcare-related controlled vocabularies was developed in Bethesda, MD, over 30 years ago. Different medical vocabularies are essential for different aspects of healthcare; for example, oncologists will have a very different set of common terms from obstetricians. It’s also critical that oncologists from different hospitals and clinics use the same medical informatics for particular situations. Confusion can cause delays and even incorrect patient diagnoses or treatment plans without this consistency.
Bringing together 190 separate medical vocabularies, the UMLS includes at least 3.4 million individual healthcare concepts and many more millions of related terms and concepts. Categories include genomics, molecular biology, cancer research, alcohol and other drugs, and clinical classifications software, as well as many more.
UMLS applies codes to particular terms to quickly identify and define them. No matter what type of database a medical term is stored in, as long as it’s given the correct identifier from the UMLS, anyone looking up the UMLS definition will work from the same information.
What Are the Benefits of the UMLS?
Utilizing UMLS has multiple benefits, from consistent terminology that everyone understands to the development of relevant and effective medical devices.
Improved Interoperability
Confusion over medical terms can cause unnecessary delays for patients. A specialist who has to wait for clarification can’t prescribe the right drugs or set the correct treatment program in motion. UMLS codes ensure that terms are used correctly and that notes and other stored patient information are consistent, improving interoperability.
Better Patient Care
More accurate health information means better outcomes for patients. Shorter waiting times, precise diagnoses, and error-free treatments help get individuals back to good health faster.
Consistent Medical Education
Medical students who learn from vastly different knowledge sources may enter their fields, unable to communicate effectively with each other and their patients. Learning from unified medical vocabularies keeps education consistent and enables teachers and lecturers to constantly improve the standard of education provided.
Enhanced Medical Product Development
Medical devices — from scanning technologies to wearables — require the involvement of multiple stakeholders. Developers, medical personnel, and investors all need to understand exactly what’s required and the potential of the device. UMLS terms help keep everyone on the same page and move product development along faster.
Who Uses UMLS?
UMLS coding and standards are beneficial to anyone who uses EHRs, healthcare apps, and any medical information storage database. Telehealth app developers can use UMLS codes to ensure that biomedical terms are consistent across multiple apps and services. EHR developers can create systems automatically interoperable with other UMLS-based databases, a medical knowledge base, or information retrieval systems.
UMLS is largely language agnostic, so whether a developer codes in HTML or Python, they can ensure they’re coding the relevant bioinformatics concepts correctly. Access to UMLS also includes the ability to view RxNorm files, providing standardized information for drugs.
The UMLS is administered by the US National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Individuals can request licenses and a UMLS Terminology Services (UTS) account directly through the main.gov website. The site also includes how to cite NLM- and PubMed-based UMLS information, how to create citations, and how to use their API services to connect to UMLS data and source vocabularies.
Key Aspects of UMLS
The UMLS is a dataset of biomedical concepts and concept names called the Metathesaurus, a lexicon of related terms, and a semantic network that explains the relationships between terms. Each of these UMLS knowledge sources has a different purpose.
Metathesaurus
The UMLS Metathesaurus brings together biomedical vocabularies from numerous branches of medicine and medical academia. These collections of biomedical information include, but aren’t limited to:
MeSH
SNOMED CT
MedDRA
ICD-10-CM
Each of these vocabularies includes a different collection of biomedical terminology. Some terms will be repeated across the vocabularies, but each use will have an identical code to ensure consistency.
SPECIALIST Lexicon
Because numerous words and phrases can be used for the same concept, it’s useful to have a system that highlights where one concept means the same as another. For example, fever and pyrexia have the same meaning, yet different medical personnel may use one or the other. The SPECIALIST Lexicon lists medical term variants, utilizing common English words and biomedical terminology and lexical tools for natural language processing and database developers.
Semantic Network
The UMLS Semantic Network lists Semantic Types and Semantic Relations. Semantic Types ensure consistent categorization of medical terms and concepts in the Metathesaurus, using particular medical subject headings. Semantic Relations explain how particular semantic types relate to each other.
How TempDev Can Help with Healthcare Software Implementation
Effective electronic health records must be able to seamlessly and securely communicate with systems across multiple providers and associated partners. NextGen software is a top choice for healthcare facilities because of its focus on interoperability and ease of use, helping patients get the care they need faster via quicker retrieval of vital information.
TempDev’s team of expert consultants can help you effectively integrate NextGen solutions for optimized clinical workflows and streamlined processes. Call us at 1888.TEMPDEV or contact us online to learn more about effective digital transformation and improved interoperability.
Interested?
Agree with our point of view? Become our client!
Did you enjoy this read? Feel free to share it with your contacts.
