Mapping between international medical terminologies_Annex 6.4._SHN WP3 D3.3

Over the last two decades research on medical terminologies and classification systems has become a popular topic, above all in the last decade, after the institutional measures, in Europe and abroad, expressing the need for an integrated management of patients' healthcare data, and for guaranteeing semantic interoperability of these data. In fact, messaging standards employed in the healthcare domain use different terms for the same concept and the consequence is often clinical misinterpretation, wrong management of the registered knowledge, misdiagnosis of the patient's problem. Much work has already been done to resolve this problem through the development and use of coding systems and clinical terminologies, to be used by physicians during their daily practice for coding patients' clinical data in their electronic health records (EHRs), and a huge standardization effort has allowed to establish a number of classification systems. However, the use of these terminological resources have proved unsuccessful in resolving semantic heterogeneity in healthcare. In this context, an effective solution to this problem is the introduction of methods for establishing unambiguous mappings and/or matches among the different coding systems, terminologies and existing ontologies to facilitate their semantic interoperability. In the present report, an updated review of the literature related to medical terminology mapping methodologies and techniques is presented together with an overview of the existing mappings between the SNOMED CT and the other medical terminologies and between the most used medical coding systems within the european context.