Healthcare, health technology, and life sciences organizations manage disparate clinical terminologies, resulting in fragmented data, limited interoperability, and increased administrative burden. Without a centralized terminology management platform, these sectors face technical debt, regulatory risk, and barriers to efficient data exchange. Scalable tools to manage standardized and custom vocabularies, like terminology servers, are critical for ensuring data quality, regulatory compliance, and effective decision-making.
So, what is a terminology server, and how can it improve your business?
What is a terminology server?
Though they have many applications, terminology servers are especially important in the healthcare industry. In this context, a terminology server is a specialized system that manages and provides access to standardized clinical terminologies, such as SNOMED CT®, ICD-10-CM, LOINC®, or RxNorm® to ensure the consistent and standardized use of medical terms across health IT systems. It supports functions like concept lookup, code validation, value set expansion, and terminology mapping, enabling interoperability and accurate data exchange in healthcare environments.
How are terminology servers used in healthcare settings?
Terminology servers are used in healthcare to standardize medical language across electronic health record (EHR) systems, ensuring that terms for diagnoses, procedures, and medications are consistent and accurate. They help translate between coding systems (like SNOMED CT and ICD-10-CM), making data sharing and analysis easier. This supports better clinical decisions and improves patient care coordination.
What should I look for in a terminology server?
A terminology server should give you the ability to access industry-standard code sets and manage your own terms. It should also help you remain compliant by updating codes when new ones are released, which further supports interoperability.
How can health technology and life science organizations benefit from a terminology server?
In the life sciences sector, inconsistent terminology across clinical trials, real-world evidence (RWE) studies, and regulatory submissions undermines data harmonization and regulatory approval processes. Organizations can face challenges when attempting to align diverse data sources to standardized vocabularies, while also managing custom dictionaries and internal code systems. The absence of a centralized, flexible terminology management solution hampers efforts to streamline study design, improve pharmacovigilance, and ensure semantic consistency across research and development activities.
Health technology companies support standardized clinical data exchange, integrating with multiple healthcare systems while complying with evolving interoperability standards. However, the complexity of working with various terminologies and inconsistent local code sets across clients makes it challenging to ensure clean, usable, and compliant data. Without a centralized terminology management platform to manage, validate, and map both standard and custom vocabularies, developers are forced to build ad hoc solutions. This increases technical debt, slows product development, and limits the scalability and reliability of health tech platforms.
Looking to streamline workflows, ensure regulatory compliance, and improve data quality and standardization? Learn more about IMO Health’s life sciences and health tech solutions.
SNOMED and SNOMED CT are registered trademarks of SNOMED International.
RxNorm® is a registered trademark of the National Library of Medicine.
