MatchMetrix Terminology Registry

In today’s health care climate, organizations often have to interact with various clinical environments and must therefore contend with the cumbersome task of supporting multiple standardized vocabularies, terminologies, and ontologies.  In any single clinical space, several of these standards will be involved and the organization will need to interchange data coded with these differing datasets.  The effort to interoperate with all of these standards -- to link similar codes and maintain an independent master compendia reference -- is an arduous, labor intensive task. It also requires countless hours of manual effort from highly valued, specialized knowledge workers: the Data Stewards.

Built on the MatchMetrix MDM Platform, the MatchMetrix Terminology Registry with enterprise vocabulary services creates a convenient, cross-referenced and centralized registry of codes. The Terminology Registry has capabilities to import, version, upgrade, link and maintain standards from commercial and government sources. Using our industry proven matching logic tuned for the local environment, the Terminology Registry accepts data feeds from disparate code set providers and cross references them to the other entities participating in the ecosystem.  The Terminology Registry supports editing of content within standards, mapping across standards, and delivery of content to EMRs, laboratories, PHRs, physician offices, or any business intelligence application.

For example, the LOINC standard is used extensively in the Clinical Laboratory space, but each lab vendor uses different naming standards and presents test information in a variety of formats.  The Terminology Registry will evaluate the incoming data against pre-loaded compendia, match and standardize the codes across lab vendors, and deliver the normalized “LOINCed” lab test roster to downstream consumers for easy ordering. The headache of managing multiple lab vendors is relieved and replaced by a single delivery channel that provides the latest updates as they are recorded by the Terminology Registry. Additionally, physician offices can connect directly to the Terminology Registry on an ad hoc basis and retrieve the latest normalized compendia from any lab vendor that participates in the ecosystem.

Other benefits of the Terminology Registry include:

• Integrate code sets using sophisticated and locally tuned matching algorithm
• Link across versions of the same standard (e.g. DSM-III, IV, and V, or ICD-9 to ICD-10).
• Build custom subsets or value add current list for downstream users (enable data cleanup workflows)
• Push results or lookup service to downstream users
• Non-invasive integration does not require alteration of the source systems
• Normalization mechanism to maintain versions