Nine Desired Technical Criteria
1. Comprehensive Domain Coverage: The terminology includes most of the concepts and terms needed for primary clinical documentation in the defined domain area.
2. Meaningless Identifiers: The unique codes used to identify concepts in the terminology are unrelated to the meaning of the concepts or their locations in the concept hierarchy.
3. Multi-Hierarchies: A coded concept may be the “child” of more than one other coded concept in the terminology’s hierarchy.
4. Non-Redundancy: Each unique meaning is represented by just one coded concept in the terminology. Each concept may have multiple synonymous terms, but the relationship of the terms to the concept must be explicitly represented.
5. Formal Concept Definitions: The terminology includes logical definitions of coded concepts, allowing redundancy to be automatically detected and appropriate hierarchical relationships to be automatically inferred.
6. Infrastructure/Tools for Collaborative Terminology Development: The terminology is maintained using tools that allow many people to work on a terminology at the same time, and support the assignment, scheduling, collection and integration of their work.
7. Change Sets: Each new version of the terminology includes a complete accounting of the added, retired and modified concepts and terms (i.e., a “delta” file).
8. Mappings to Other Terminologies: The content of the terminology includes mappings to other relevant terminologies, and these mappings have been validated.
9. Support for Local Customization: Tools and processes exist that allow users of the terminology to make local additions and customizations, and later to merge these changes with the subsequent version of the terminology.