A Semantically Enriched Architecture for an Italian Laboratory Terminology System

This paper presents the architectural solutions and the first implementation results of a terminology service that aims to support Italian health institutions in the deployment of their clinical data in a semantically standardized format while main-taining their internal coding habits unchanged. As a first ex-ample of this general idea, an implementation structure of a translation system in LOINC for laboratory tests is presented. The first prototype of this system is at a testing stage within some clinical institutions of the Ligurian region. In this paper, the workflow of collaboration between the staff of a medical informatics academic laboratory and some hospital analysis laboratories is presented. With this system more than 400 rec-ords relative to clinical tests were coded with the appropriate LOINC code and these translations were inserted into a Com-mon Terminology Services 2 (CTS2) based tool to support fu-ture cooperative maintenance of the coding system. A compari-son with similar implementations in other English and non-English speaking countries is present. The authors thinks that the present example could be easily adopted both at a regional and at a national level in order to form an interconnected la-boratory network towards real semantic interoperability