Requirements for Reusable Infection Prevention and Control Measures for COVID-19 Response / 보건행정학회지

The management of emerging infectious diseases cannot help but completely depend on non-pharmaceutical interventions in the early stages of the outbreak. Consequently, South Korea has developed and implemented the 3T (test-trace-treat) models, non-pharmaceutical infection prevention and control (IPC) measures, in response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The IPC measures have gained global attention, rendering them to be essential in the development of a shareable, reusable, and applicable protocol for future pandemics. This study was conducted to identify the requirements necessary for standardizing the IPC measures. Three new work items of the 18 3T models were proposed to ISO/TC 304 (International Organization for Standardization/Technical Committee 304; healthcare organization management). Requirements for each IPC measure, identified by participating members (P-members) countries during the ISO ballots, were analyzed in this study. The three new work items were approved by the P-members countries after a 3-month ballot. There was a consensus that the three IPC measure models should be International Standards (IS). Other comments include (1) the models should include not only COVID-19 but also any respiratory pandemic; and (2) keep donning of level D protection at screening sites as an optional protocol, in consideration for the lack of personal protective equipment. Standardization is a systematic process of developing internationally agreed-upon wisdom and knowledge that consider and respect the diversity and universality of each country. It is expected that such standardized applicable IPC measure models contribute to global efforts to rapidly respond to a public health emergency of international concern during its early stages.

Development of Clinical Contents Model Markup Language for Electronic Health Records / 대한의료정보학회지

OBJECTIVES: To develop dedicated markup language for clinical contents models (CCM) to facilitate the active use of CCM in electronic health record systems. METHODS: Based on analysis of the structure and characteristics of CCM in the clinical domain, we designed extensible markup language (XML) based CCM markup language (CCML) schema manually. RESULTS: CCML faithfully reflects CCM in both the syntactic and semantic aspects. As this language is based on XML, it can be expressed and processed in computer systems and can be used in a technology-neutral way. CONCLUSIONS: CCML has the following strengths: it is machine-readable and highly human-readable, it does not require a dedicated parser, and it can be applied for existing electronic health record systems.

The Development of Clinical Terminology Dictionary for Integration and Management of Clinical Terminologies in EMR Systems / 대한의료정보학회지

OBJECTIVE: The development of a dictionary of clinical terminology based on medical concepts is essential for understanding the precise meanings of the clinical terminologies used in EMR systems. For an unambiguous presentation and retrieval of the terminologies in practical data entry, this study propose a clinical terminology dictionary, which integrates and manages the wide range of data in EMR Systems. METHODS: The structure of the system and attributes were defined. The structures should satisfy the following: all terminologies should be consistent with the medical concepts, all concepts have multiple relationships, all concepts have many synonyms, all concepts can be mapped to concepts in an external medical terminology system, and all concepts can be grouped as value sets by setting the "domain". RESULTS: With the derived entity objects and attributes, the physical clinical terminology database was constructed and an editor was developed using MySQL 5.0.45 and JAVA Swing. To verify the structure and contents of the developed clinical terminology dictionary, the terminology experts used the editor to search and register the medical concepts. CONCLUSION: Although the contents refinement and complements are an unsolved problem, it is anticipated that the proposed research will provide unambiguous meanings of the clinical terminology and be applicable to many services in EMR systems.