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 maintaining their internal coding habits unchanged. As a first example 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 records relative to clinical tests were coded with the appropriate LOINC code and these translations were inserted into a Common Terminology Services 2 (CTS2) based tool to support future cooperative maintenance of the coding system. A comparison 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 laboratory network towards real semantic interoperability.