Article
The role of clinical terminology in pharmacogenomics
The promise of pharmacogenomics in medicine is cause for optimism, but the pace of progress will be slow without the adoption of a common clinical terminology.
The promise of pharmacogenomics in medicine is cause for optimism, but the pace of progress will be slow without the adoption of a common clinical terminology.
Last year, IMO’s Chief Strategy Officer, Dale Sanders, sat down with HIMSS to talk about COVID-19 data aggregation and management challenges. As we head into 2022, the obstacles and urgency remain.
As expectations for diversity and inclusion grow, the words we use – in any situation – must be carefully considered. Learn how IMO is embracing this challenge and heeding the call for more fair and equitable clinical terminology across the healthcare ecosystem.
IMO has examined the role of clinical terminology in documenting the pandemic from a variety of different angles. Check out this resource roundup to see what we’ve learned.
IMO’s Chief Strategy Officer, Dale Sanders, highlights just a few of the secondary uses enabled by IMO’s comprehensive clinical terminology.
Providing patient care – and understanding the resulting clinical data – is no longer a responsibility isolated to the primary provider. Today, medicine is a team effort involving multiple clinicians, immediate family members, and other healthcare professionals. Given this, many ask how the EHR can adapt to act as a communication medium for the modern patient’s care team.
The fact that the letters IMO don’t just stand for Intelligent Medical Objects isn’t lost on this medical coding company. Indeed, we believe it’s high time IMO embraced our text-slang status, and we’re kicking things off with In My Opinion, a monthly Ideas series featuring Q&As with IMO employees. We’re thrilled to get started with Vidhya Sivakumaran, PhD. Vidhya over to you.
IMO is committed to ensuring providers have the most up-to-date clinical terminology for documenting cases of the novel coronavirus. To help our healthcare partners manage and minimize the spread of COVID-19 – and to give providers sufficient time to align their systems with recent regulatory announcements – our December release contains updated mappings, clinical terminologies, and procedure codes related to the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
In October, the Journal of Healthcare Informatics Research published a study that explored how IMO’s terminology – coupled with natural language processing tools – could improve clinical documentation at the point of care and harvest information from the terabytes of data stored in electronic health records. Below, Roger Gildersleeve, MD, Senior Clinical Terminologist at IMO, explains the research, its findings, and future implications.
When COVID-19 first hit the US, clinicians struggled to accurately document cases of the new coronavirus, and the health IT industry quickly mobilized to provide the needed clinical terminology. Now, six months into the pandemic, COVID “long-haulers” are highlighting the ongoing need for appropriate clinical language to document side effects of the virus.
In order to gain and share insights on the coronavirus pandemic, we all need to be speaking the same clinical language. IMO’s open source data package release aims to get the global healthcare community on the same page – fast.
