HealthTerm unifies and standardizes terminology for municipalities across all of Denmark

The challenge 

To meet the demand and discovered needs of clean and correct healthcare data to deliver local healthcare and welfare services. 

Background 

In Denmark, a country of 5.8 million inhabitants, the public sector is highly decentralized and follows the principle of subsidiarity, ‘what can be dealt with on a local basis is dealt with on a local basis’. Thus, delivering welfare services in collaboration with citizens, mobilizing resources on a local level, and setting the direction for the development of local communities is done at a city-council level. 

With the structural public-sector reform of 2007, the municipalities grew larger and adopted more tasks from the regional and the state level. Specifically, the municipalities took over several activities regarding environmental control, adult education, specialized social services, and employment policies. The new areas of municipal responsibilities added to the list of existing responsibilities, for example: 

• Healthcare including rehabilitation, home care, prevention of abuse, dental care, and promotion of health 
• Social services such as care for elderly and disabled, psychiatric treatment, social psychiatry, placement of neglected children, and specialized education 

For Danish municipalities, this new type of information and amount of information created a new challenge in need to be addressed. 

Solution  

In order to solve the challenge posed Denmark chose HealthTerm. 

HealthTerm is used for handling all common terminologies for community care, based on SNOMED CT, ICD-10, ICF, ICPC2 and others. 

The solution ensures successful deliveries of projects containing all classified codes used for social care (or social determinants of health, SDOH) and elderly care (SNOMED CT, ICD10, ICF, ICPC2 and others). This is also required for the law of care reporting. HealthTerm enables a system where all reporting and documentation is done with the same terms (standard healthcare codes) and reported and referenced back according to the different service laws. HealthTerm also enables information sharing between all municipalities across the country of Denmark. 

The result 

• Distribution of common terminologies to all municipalities across all Denmark for updating their different IT systems. 
• Standardizing all terminologies for home care and SDOH, to ensure that data can be shared and re-used across all settings. 
• Time and resource savings, such as manual manpower to keep the system updated 
• Higher data quality across all systems 
• The public browser enables all chosen content to become publicly available for all users 

Denmark continues to expand the use of HealthTerm due to the benefits and results they experience within the healthcare and welfare services data challenge. Like Denmark, many countries have healthcare and social determinants of health (SDOH), data in many different code languages and systems that pose a challenge to patients and healthcare and welfare services alike. Our customers are bridging the gap between clinical care, social care and patient experience with the support of HealthTerm.  

For more information email info@carecom.com