Monday, June 16, 2014

NIC NOC Who's there?

Arguably in the various Healthcare Standards battles I've watched, it is most often the nurses that act like grown ups.  But not always. I sit on the sidelines and observe this time around, as the Nursing Terminology Wars heat up again in the discussion of appropriate terminologies for encoding different parts of the care plan.  Someone asserts that general agreement was made to use terminology X, another person cites terminology Y is better suited.  This same debate occurred more than five years ago in my memory, and I'm sure it has occurred many times prior to that.  For the most part, I'm hoping against hope that it won't crop up again after this minor flare up.

Several (perhaps the majority even), are fairly clear, and readily understand the way forward, and that is simply to use SNOMED CT (at least in countries that license it) for this challenge.  NIC, NOC, NANDA, and CCC terms have all been mapped into SNOMED CT.  Unlike many of the nursing specific vocabularies, SNOMED CT is free to use by all in the US, does not have restrictive licensing agreements on use with other terminology systems, and has already been built into many products.

So why are we having this debate again?


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