Work Package Description

Health Care Providers requesting information, for example a Patient Summary from a different Member State, have to be provided with a document translated into the official language of their own country for the sake of applicability and comprehension. The goal is that, while each country continues to use its own terms, they shall be understood by all other Member States in an automatic fashion, leaving no room for ambiguity and therefore preventing medical error.

Achieving this aim of semantic interoperability is the task of WP 3.5. Through the definition of an epSOS Master Translation/Transcoding Catalogue, a basis for terminology translation shall be provided in line with the functional requirements of the Patient Summary and ePrescription services as defined by Work Packages 3.1 and 3.2.

The ultimate goal is the communication of information that can be processed, while keeping unchanged the structure and contents of the original documents or datasets in each country. This will be achieved by building a pivot document or a model of a dataset based on commonly adopted definitions, content, vocabulary and structures. The content of Patient Summary and ePrescription services, or the data elements, will be thematically grouped into value sets. Once the appropriate value sets are chosen based on the existing Use Cases, they are mapped onto existing code systems.

Although complete code systems for medical conditions, procedures, pharmaceuticals etc. are readily available, it would not be possible to use them in their entirety within the epSOS context. The ICD-10 system (“International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems”, defined by the WHO) alone contains about 155,000 different terms.

Various code systems cover the spectrum of the epSOS value sets as defined by the Use Cases, such as the ICD-10, ATC, ICD-9 and SNOMED CT. However, a selection of the most significant terms has to be made in order to achieve a reasonably manageable content.

The value sets mentioned above provide the basis for the Master Value Set Catalogue (MVS), which will be later turned into the Master Translation/ Transcoding Catalogue. It is also a task of WP 3.5 to define the standard interface to the Master Translation/Transcoding Catalogue: the Terminology Access Services Interface will allow 'on-the-fly' complete and accurate correspondence between the terminology used in the original document and its interoperable counterpart, as well as the target language.

In summary, semantic interoperability needs common elements such as:

• a common data structure of the documents to be exchanged (pivot documents)
• a commonly understood medical terminology based on value sets extracted out of officially existing code systems used in these documents, namely the epSOS Master Value Sets Catalogue. The content of the MVS serves as a basis for translating into each Member State language and cross-reference between different code systems, resulting in the epSOS Master Translation/Transcoding Catalogue
• a way of accessing and maintaining the content present in the Master Translation/Transcoding Catalogue that is transparent to the user: the Terminology Access Services Interface.