ICH99 - Controlled Medical Terminologies: What can they do for me?

Controlled Medical Terminologies: What can they do for me?

Dr. Jim Cimino (Columbia University)

Abstract

The terminology of health care is often overwhelming to laypersons trying to delve into the vast terrain of health information. The terminology understood by computing systems is at the same time more precise and less comprehensible. However, controlled terminologies are a important aspect of health information applications. This talk will explore some of the roles of terminology and examine where the consumer needs to be concerned about them and where they can be employed quietly behind the scenes. Examples will be drawn from experience with the Medical Entities Dictionary (the MED) at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.

About Dr. James Cimino

James J. Cimino is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Medical Informatics and Medicine at Columbia University. He received a BS in biology from Brown University in 1977, an MD from New York Medical College in 1981, completed an internal medicine residency (with board certification) in 1984, and a medical informatics fellowship at Harvard Medical School in 1988. During his fellowship, he was primarily responsible for the development of a knowledge base for a medical diagnosis system (DXplain), contributed to the initial development of the National Library of Medicine's Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) and worked on vocabulary issues for DXplain and the Computer Stored Ambulatory Record (COSTAR).

Since 1988, he has been at Columbia, where his time is divided between patient care, teaching, research and development. He teaches a variety of courses in the Department of Medical Informatics and is a clinical instructor in the Department of Medicine in the in-patient and out-patient services. One area of his research involves controlled medical vocabularies for medical decision support (particularly in the development of expert systems approaches to vocabulary management) and he is developing the controlled medical vocabulary for use in the comprehensive clinical information system for the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. Another area of research involves the use of Internet resources to support patient care. To explore this, he is developing an Internet-based clinical information system, now in actual use, that integrates information sources from the World Wide Web into the clinician's workstation.

He is currently the principle investigator on a National Information Infrastructure (NII) contract, and an Electronic Medical Record grant, both from the National Library of Medicine, and directs a medical informatics fellowship at Columbia. He has served or is serving on the scientific program committees for 7 national and two international medical informatics meetings, including chairing the AMIA Annual Fall Symposium in 1996. He has over 110 publications, including 22 first-authored papers in peer- reviewed medical informatics journals in the past five years. He has been a reviewer for the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association and for the journal Computer and is currently on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association and Medicine on the Net.

He is a member of the American College of Physicians, the Columbia University Faculty Council, ASTM Committee E31 (Computerized Systems), and is a founding member of AMIA, where he has served on the Board of Directors since 1994 (currently Secretary). He was elected a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics in 1992.