Looking for "best practices" in mapping

[Sara Armson]

I am looking for best practices for mapping concepts to another dictionary using the terms: SAME-AS, NARROWER-THAN, & BROADER-THAN. 

EXAMPLE

 If I am mapping “Tinea Versicolor” (a fungal infection of the skin) and the dictionary I am mapping to contains:

1) “Infection” 

2) “Fungal Infection”

3) “Fungal Skin Infection”

Questions:

Has anyone developed an internal best practice procedure for mapping an instance like this?

Should all 3 be mapped? 

Should only the closest term be mapped? 

Does mapping best practices vary based on other factors?

Does anyone have an suggestions for developing a best practice?

(I cross-posted this question here.  Please consider using the OpenMRS Talk Terminology board)

[Andrew Kanter]

I answered in OpenMRS Talk too

Sara,
Generally I feel that terminology is not an easy thing for most people to do without additional training and that is why I created the CIEL dictionary to help people. It is MUCH easier to find an interface terminology which is the same thing as the term you are mapping (SAME-AS) and then rely on someone else's maps to get to the reference terminology (SNOMED, etc.). In your example, it sounds like you are trying to map to a categorical terminology like ICD. You could map it NARROWER-THAN to ALL of those. Fungal skin infection would be the closest but none of them are SAME-AS. However, if you are ICD coding, then there are special rules which dictate which ICD code should be used for a given term, and those might not be totally obvious from the term and the categories.

In general you should only map to the closest map and not any that are in the same hierarchy (so Fungal infection is a parent of fungal skin infection and would be redundant). There are other mapping relationship types which might be added. You should probably not have two SAME-AS maps within the same mapped terminology.

Happy to provide more detail if needed.

 

--------------------
Andrew S. Kanter, MD MPH FACMI

Asst. Prof. of Clinical Biomedical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology

Columbia University
Email: andrew...@dbmi.columbia.edu
Mobile: +1 (646) 469-2421
Office: +1 (212) 305-4842
Skype: akanter-ippnw
Yahoo: andy_kanter

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