An Interoperable UMLS Terminology Service Using FHIR

Rishi Saripalle, Mehdi Sookhak and Mahboobeh Haghparast
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Rishi Saripalle: 5150 School of Information Technology, Illinois State University, Normal, IL 61790, USA
Mehdi Sookhak: 5150 School of Information Technology, Illinois State University, Normal, IL 61790, USA
Mahboobeh Haghparast: Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur 50603, Malaysia

Future Internet, 2020, vol. 12, issue 11, 1-20

Abstract: The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is an internationally recognized medical vocabulary that enables semantic interoperability across various biomedical terminologies. To use its knowledge, the users must understand its complex knowledge structure, a structure that is not interoperable or is not compliant with any known biomedical and healthcare standard. Further, the users also need to have good technical skills to understand its inner working and interact with UMLS in general. These barriers might cause UMLS usage concerns among inter-disciplinary users in biomedical and healthcare informatics. Currently, there exists no terminology service that normalizes UMLS’s complex knowledge structure to a widely accepted interoperable healthcare standard and allows easy access to its knowledge, thus hiding its workings. The objective of this research is to design and implement a light-weight terminology service that allows easy access to UMLS knowledge structured using the fast health interoperability resources (FHIR) standard, a widely accepted interoperability healthcare standard. The developed terminology service, named UMLS FHIR, leverages FHIR resources and features, and can easily be integrated into any application to consume UMLS knowledge in the FHIR format without the need to understand UMLS’s native knowledge structure and its internal working.

Keywords: Unified Medical Language System; FHIR; interoperability; biomedical terminology service; UMLS REST; semantic interoperability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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