What are Terminology Services?

First, we should define what terminology is:

ter·mi·nol·o·gy
noun
noun: terminology; plural noun: terminologies
the body of terms used with a particular technical application in a subject of study, theory, profession, etc.

For our use, the ‘subject of study’ we are referring to is Clinical Terminology or:
a set of concepts and relationships that provide a common reference point for comparisons and aggregation of data about the entire health care process, recorded by multiple different individuals, systems, or institutions.

Second, let’s discuss why common clinical terminology is important? For example, in the world of healthcare there are a vast number of electronic health records (EHRs), clinical applications and analytic applications that all relate to data surrounding a patient record.  The patient record may include conditions, results and encounters (to name a few). In this vast number of EHRs, also lives a vast number of ‘customizations’ that can be enabled for the systems.  Some EHRs allow a clinical user to create a mnemonic code or shortcut to a common description of a problem or procedure. This is useful for a clinician, but may not be useful or relevant to another user outside the walls of the practice or organization.  Another clinician may miss or misunderstand pertinent patient information because they don’t speak the same ‘language’ as the originating practice.  Additionally, the practice or organization may miss some funding or reimbursement opportunities because the custom codes are recognized by funding/reimbursement authorities.

Terminology services allow an organization to map or crosswalk these custom codes to a standard terminology, such as ICD-10 or CPT^® and help ensure proper billing, analytics and identifying   Terminology services does not include managing these codes via a complicated group of spreadsheets and many hours of searching codes across multiple sources; but, it does include utilizing HealthTerm.  HealthTerm is your single source of truth;ensure your local & custom codes, mapsets and subsets are housed and managed in one common location.