Towards the Development of a CTS2-based Terminology Service in the Italian Federated Electronic Health Record

Semantic interoperability is essential for advanced Electronic Health Records (EHRs) functionality, and in particular for data exchanges, and efficient communication among clinicians. Integrated terminology services offer the chance to manage clinical code systems, both standard and local, and value sets, through a series of functionalities such as searching, querying, cross mapping, etc. The main standard in the domain is Clinical Terminology Service Release 2 (CTS2) by Health Level 7 (HL7). This paper describes the approach used for designing and developing an integrated terminology service based on the CTS2 standard, namely Servizio Terminologico Integrato (STI), which aims to support domain experts and healthcare organizations in ensuring semantic interoperability in the Italian Federated EHR