Unified Medical Language System Analysis

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The field of clinical medicine, bioinformatics, and research employ an endless list of terms, abbreviations, and codes. To further complicate communication, many of these terms, abbreviations, and codes can vary dramatically due to geography or educational background. This is where the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) comes into the picture. The UMLS unites nomenclatures such as ICD-9, ICD-10, ICD-10-PCS, CPT, SNOMED, LONIC, and other medical vocabularies into one resource. The UMLS was created by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) in 1986 as a government funded project. Since that time the UMLS has become a valuable resource to the medical community, and has contributed to the federal standards created for electronic health …show more content…

Concepts are determined by attributes and definitions of key terms. Relationships are determined by concepts, and data derived from the various source vocabularies. The Semantics Network utilizes the Metathesaurus to create semantic types (high level relationships), and semantic relationships (relationships between semantic types). Sematic types are organized into a hierarchy of events and entities, for example a gene is an entity and a laboratory test is an event. The SPECIALIST Lexicon is in simple terms a way to unite different inflections, derivatives, and spelling variations of words or terms. For example, the Lexicon will interpret and understand the differences in verbs or nouns used in medical terminology. The UMLS is a very detailed subject, and I have provided a brief overview. To adequately understand the complexity of the UMLS would require many pages of detailed explanations. Mainly, for our purposes we simply need to understand a broad overview to relate the importance of the UMLS to the HIM …show more content…

Imagine you are analyzing a medical record for clinical documentation improvement, clinical analysis, or quality improvement and you have several free form clinical notes in the chart. To effectively complete the task the unstructured data needs to be converted into structured data, which is when the UMLS is needed. One of the features of the UMLS is that is structured using natural language processing (NLP). A user can type in any term, phrase, or abbreviation and generate possible matches. Inversely, if an HIM professional is using a complete, coded medical record UMLS will provide crosswalks between the various coding systems to come up with an accurate representation of the overall condition and medical care a patient

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