Kaiser Donates Internal Medical Terminology to HHS

Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente announced it is donating its Convergent Medical Terminology (CMT) to the International Healthcare Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO) for U.S. distribution through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) so that all health care providers—large and small—can benefit from the translation-enabling technology.

This donation makes the results of years of work at Kaiser Permanente available to help U.S. health professionals and hospitals achieve key meaningful use standards set forth by the Office of the National Coordinator of Health IT (ONC) and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Kaiser Permanente is a pioneer in supporting the production of structured health data by creating and linking clinician- and patient-friendly terminology to the health data standards now required for U.S.-wide use. The Convergent Medical Terminology has been developed by clinicians and technologists over many years. It is in active use to document thousands of patient encounters every day. Kaiser Permanente's Convergent Medical Terminology will now be available for use by a wide range of health IT developers and users to speed implementation of electronic health record systems. This will support efficient patient care, as well as the production and export of standardized data needed to support quality assessment, decision support, exchange of data for patients with multiple health care providers, and public health surveillance.