National Library of Medicine wants health care organizations to test drive Medical mapping tool

The National Library of Medicine wants health care organizations and vendors to test drive its new mapping tool that covers 5,000 standardized clinical terms , to create a standard medical vocabulary to support applications for electronic health records

The Obama administration is distributing more than $19 billion in payments to doctors and hospitals that buy and use digital record systems for patients.

The library released a draft mapping tool that links terms from the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT) to the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision (ICD-9). The SNOMED-CT is the terminology used for clinical purposes, while the ICD-9 has terms used for billing and administrative support.

The map was designed with help from SNOMED-CT terms most often used by Kaiser Permanente and the University of Nebraska, to support semi-automated administrative reporting and reimbursement for health care services.

The library wants users to “test drive”’ the map from Dec. 1 through Feb. 1, 2010, and to provide feedback to guide developing related maps. The related maps include mapping of SNOMED-CT to the ICD-Tenth revision, Clinical Modification and Procedure Coding System.