Rationale

Most countries in the region do not adopt yet a framework for standards implementation. As a result, health information systems used by different healthcare providers are still operating in siloes and unable to communicate with one another. Over the years, these siloed systems have been using a wide range of clinical terminologies to define diseases, treatments, operations, and medicines.

Interoperability cuts across various data layers such as context (semantics), architecture (structure), language (syntax), and presentation (system). With semantics as one of the core foundational elements for health data interoperability, countries should invest in setting up a terminology service for reliable and accurate exchange of data in the national healthcare sector. This would enable the creation of standardized clinical terminology, which would eliminate the need for duplicated efforts and thus, ensure good quality of stored data.

To address this capacity gap, the Standards and Interoperability Lab – Asia together with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) will organize a series of workshops for the Asia Pacific region on these topics: (1) FHIR Terminology Resources; (2) FHIR Terminology Operations; (3) Mapping of Terminology to Ontoserver; (4) Terminology Content in Ontoserver; and (5) Introduction to SNOMED CT (from SNOMED International).

Objectives

After the series of workshops, the participants will be able to:

1. Discuss primary terminology-related structures and relationships in FHIR resources;
2. Demonstrate how to use FHIR terminology resources to send or receive data from a FHIR repository; 
3. Map existing terminology into FHIR code systems;
4. Explain syndication of terminology content in Ontoserver
5. Describe the features of SNOMED CT 

Prerequisites

• Prior knowledge to FHIR

Day 3 Topic

• Mapping of Terminology to Ontoserver