Charlie Harp's blog

Part One - The Medication Domain

As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, we have been given a mandate to evolve our simplistic, episodic and transient patient records into the robust, longitudinal, and precise paragons of technology that has been promised in board meetings, speeches and science fiction movies. This can be accomplished. Like all good architecture, achieving this objective will require an evolution over time that starts with stable foundational concepts that support the goal. There are a number of domains of clinical terminology: problems, procedures, laboratory tests, nursing orders, etc. One of the most pervasive and complicated of these is medications.

The purpose of this series on medication concepts for engineers is to provide a overview of the moving parts of medications, how they exist in terminologies today, how they are used in systems today and how they could be used in the future to the betterment of healthcare IT.

Medication concepts are used throughout applications in healthcare information technology in various ways. They are used to order medications, record allergies, track inventory, manage purchase pricing, identify insurance coverage, transmit prescriptions, trigger alerts and workflow rules, and the list goes on. It should not be a surprise that the ways that medications are represented in the various standard, proprietary and homegrown terminologies have become quite complicated over the years.

How is the Medication Domain Different?

The medication domain is different from other clinical domains in a few ways.

General functional variability and the resulting ‘Fuzziness'