Doctors are human beings – really. They don’t naturally blurt out the likes of …

Diabetes mellitus of mother complicating pregnancy childbirth or the puerperium unspecified as to episode of care

also known as ICD9 code 648.00. They select or type Pregnancy in Diabetes or perhaps the longer Diabetes Mellitus, in Pregnancy.

Here are two worlds – the… Read More »

RxNORM defines drugs. It declares that Warfarin Oral Tablet is the ingredient Warfarin combined with the dose form Oral Tablet. It tells us that this compound is sold under four catchy names, Coumadin, Jantoven, Marfarin and Narfarin.

But there’s more inside RxNORM’s awful release format, a hefty gem from the VA called National Drug File, Reference Terminology (NDFRT). With NDFRT,… Read More »

For us, medical expression boils down to triples, simple subject-predicate-object statements …

    The problem is Hypertension
                   of-patient "Joe Smith"
                   recorded-on 2011-10-21
                   diagnosed-by "Dr Fred Jones"

… one triple after another, capturing a patient’s health, and so a key metric for us is how many triples does a typical patient get? Without a figure, we can’t know how big… Read More »

In our world, the web-of-data, everything is a simple statement, a triple of subject-verb-object. So when we look at an EHR, that’s what we see – statements. Joe is allergic to strawberries, Fred takes Nexium.

Funny enough, the notion that a health-data repository is just a container for statements makes sense to the non-technical: it’s the technical-insiders who balk… Read More »

Take a look at VistA’s allergy schema and hone in on the most important field, the horribly named gmr_allergy. This slot holds the cause of an allergy which can be one of five different types:

1. GMR ALLERGIES (120_82) Example: CHOCOLATE
2. VA GENERIC (50_6). Example: PENICILLIN
3. DRUG (50). Example: PENICILLIN VK 125MG/5ML
4. DRUG INGREDIENTS (50_416)

… Read More »