1.1 Main purpose
The purpose of this European Standard is to establish the characteristics and the conformance rules required
to synthetically describe the organisation and content of a terminological system in health. This European
Standard has been developed to allow the production of specific standards on categorial structures for
particular healthcare subject fields with the minimum requirements to support meaningful exchange of
information.
This European Standard is applicable to:
-facilitate the construction of new terminological systems in a regular form which will increase their coherence
and expressiveness;
-facilitate maintenance of terminological systems;
-increase consistency and coherence of existing terminological systems;
-allow systematic cross-references between items of different types of terminological systems;
-facilitate convergence among terminological systems;
-make explicit the overlap between different health care domains terminological systems;
-provide elements for negotiation about integration of different terminological systems into information
systems between the respective developers;
-enable the systematic evaluation of terminological systems.
1.2 Target groups
The target groups for this European Standard are:
-designers of specialised standard healthcare terminological categorial structures;
-developers of healthcare terminological systems including classifications and coding systems;
-producers of services for terminological systems and designers of software including applications for natural
language processing;
-information modellers, knowledge engineers, and standards developers building models for health
information management systems;
-developers of information systems that require an explicit system of concepts;
-developers of mark-up standards for representation of healthcare documents.
1.3 Topics outside the scope
This European Standard has been developed for use as an integrated part of computer-based applications
and for the electronic healthcare record. It would be of limited value for manual use.