Terminology

en

TermX provides a unique open-source terminology server based on CTS2 and FHIR standards within adapters for authoring, publishing, and import of external classifications.

Every clinical field needs a strong, sustainable, and relevant terminology base behind it. To provide such thing the use of a separate terminology server is required. There are or have been several terminology servers on the market, such as Ontoserver, Snow Owl, TermoGit, Metamorphosys, HIBA, LexEVS, Apelon DTS, etc.

Analysis of existing solutions led to a problem where a lack of open-source, no-cost, high-quality tools with advanced graphical interface was found. This issue can appear while searching terminology services for data management, terminology development, publication, translation, and providing through different systems. Due to lack of services people in need of a solution can have several opportunities: use existing services and handle missing functions by themselves, developing a tool with their own specific limited needs. Both opportunities take a lot of time and resources. Also, numerous counts of new solutions in the long term may affect the quality of distributed terminology data.

The impact of solving the problem can affect all those who are in the process of searching for a terminology service with basic functionality implemented, based on FHIR standard, and open to new feature implementation and developed supplement requests. In the short term, it saves time and resources for system users and terminology specialists due to automated processes like importing data from several existing sources, data creation from templates, FHIR-based imports, and exports. Also, it affects communications with other systems due to FHIR terminology service API. In the long term, it should increase the quality of terminology data used in systems for storing and exchanging purposes with other systems.

There are several features that make TermX unique:

• The combination of available functionality, no cost, open source, advanced graphical editor, multiple languages support, and last but not least openness for new implementations.
• The reference implementation of the data model structure implementation according to the latest version of the CTS2 standard. It was used to keep standardized for terminology use, management and publishing.
• The security module allows integration with any OpenId Connect compatible SSO server supporting enterprise federated authentication and resource-based authorization.
• The powerful data transformation module provides several ways to load and synchronize data into CodeSystem, ValueSet, and MapSet from external sources. The list of external sources includes, but is not limited by: the definition of FHIR resource, WHO ICD10, EE RHK10 (Estonian classification of diagnoses), WHO ATC, EE ATC, SNOMED, LOINC, ICF, and plain text files in the custom format. Plugable architecture allows to create new personal transformers to convert files into terminology server.
• The proxy adapter enables integration with other terminology servers without data copying. SNOMED terminology with extensions, LOINC, and classification of measurement units are examples of such proxies. The use of this approach allows to maintain the existing classifier development process and eliminates data desynchronization between two sources. Proxy also eliminates large terminology imports and provides an opportunity to optimize performance in each specific terminology system. From this follows that the proxy mechanism turns the terminology server into a distributive terminology server.