A foundation terminology at the basis of morbidity coding in primary care: methodological issues

Harmonizing medical terminologies is a time-consuming but critical process to ensure information interoperability and full understanding of the meaning conveyed. This work proposes a methodology for integrating different terminological resources, both standardized and non-standardized, to create a foundation terminology to be used as reference for morbidity coding in primary care. The strength of this work is given by both the establishment of relationships between natural and structured/coded languages and the integration of lay terminologies. The resulting foundation terminology can be integrated in automatic coding systems based on rules and used by general practitioners (GPs) in the search of morbidities and related encoding.