3 Implications of 3M’s Open Source Health Data Dictionary

Last month, 3M Health Information Systems released their Health Data Dictionary as open source software making it free and available worldwide. The open source contract is part of an agreement with U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), 3M Healthcare Data Dictionary will provide the core technology to enable semantic interoperability for the joint DoD/VA integrated Electronic Health Record (iEHR), making it possible to share medical knowledge and secure patient data between care providers at U.S. military treatment facilities located around the world and VA Medical Centers.

What is the 3M Health Data Dictionary?

The 3M Health Data Dictionary is a controlled medical library server that incorporates linking terms from multiple clinical information systems and standard terminologies, such as LOINC, RxNorm, and SNOMED CT. It maps disparate medical terms to give data context and meaning, and is used to standardize data to make it interoperable and computable.  Simply put, it can be viewed as a master translator  tool linking terms together for the purpose of having structured data to comply with meaningful use requirements...