Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association PostScript

Concerning SNOMED-CT content for public health case reports

2010-09-06T03:33:26-07:00

In a recent JAMIA article,1 Deepthi Rajeeve asserts that ‘some of the existing concepts [in SNOMED CT] do not meet the case definition and do not represent reportable conditions because non-human conditions are included as children in the hierarchy’, specifically citing campylobacteriosis and porcine intestinal adenomatosis. The authors suggest creating a SNOMED CT hierarchy that is exclusively human conditions. First we must point out that the term they selected (campylobacteriosis) does not mean ‘campylobacter-induced disease in human beings’. Campylobacteriosis means (in SNOMED CT and in the real world) ‘disorder characterized by infection by any campylobacter species’. No information on the species affected is or should be implied. In fact, we believe that several disorders in this hierarchy, including the cited ‘porcine enteric adenomatosis’, are likely to be overspecified by the inclusion of species. Inclusion of species in the naming of disorders is an artifact of usage patterns...

In response to letter to the editor: 'Concerning SNOMED-CT content for public health case reports'

2010-09-06T03:33:26-07:00

We are grateful for the careful review of our article by Wilcke et al.1 We would like to reaffirm our belief that SNOMED CT is an extremely useful terminology and the best current choice for the representation of clinical findings generally, and specifically for the representation of findings in public health case reports. The broad use of SNOMED CT will lead to the understanding of important modeling issues as well as improved SNOMED CT content.

We appreciate the respondents' clarification that ‘porcine enteric adenomatosis’ is a species-independent disorder. However, the fact that we held this erroneous opinion is understandable. As ‘Porcine’ is in the name of the term, and without further explanation, the ‘true’ meaning is difficult to discern. The name of the term is ambiguous, if not outright misleading. This situation points to the underlying difficulty of making it easy for users to understand the meaning of...

Note on Friedman's 'fundamental theorem of biomedical informatics'

Mani, S. — 2010-09-06T03:33:26-07:00

Charles Friedman recently proposed a fundamental theorem of biomedical informatics (henceforth called the fundamental theorem) which states that ‘a person working in partnership with an information resource is better than that same person unassisted’.1 The person could be a clinician, researcher, student, patient or administrator interacting with the resource to perform some specific task at hand. Without loss of generality we can be agnostic about the various roles of the person and assume that the person is interacting with the information resource for decision making. Using the framework of decision removes from consideration pedestrian uses of a computational resource such as watching a movie or checking news. Hastie and Dawes2 formulate decision making as a response to a situation consisting of three parts: (1) availability of a set of actions to perform; (2) the decision maker has some prior notion regarding possible outcomes for each...