URT "indexing and classification systems" projects and biomedical knowledge standards

This paper presents an overview of the activities of the "Unità di Ricerca presso Terzi" (URT) - "Indexing and classification systems" of the National Research Council (CNR), which deals with research in organization and document management systems, indexing, classification, knowledge, and content management. Particular attention will be focused on the project of the Electronic Health Record Technological Infrastructure (InFSE), in which the URT works on the definition of ontological models, and vocabularies supporting EHR with the aim to build an updated Italian version of a unified medical reporting language. Although current Italian legislation makes mandatory the use of internationally recognized classification systems to help interoperability and exchange of information, the current structure of those systems does not allow their full use in the Italian context. For all these reasons, it is necessary to make some adaptations in the International Classification of Disease 9th Revision terminology, used for diagnosis encoding, and in the Logical Observation Names and Codes, used for encoding laboratory observations.