Coding and Messaging Systems for Women’s Health Informatics

Abstract

Recording information about symptoms, observations, actions, and outcomes is a key task of health informatics. Standardization of records is vital if data is to be used by different groups, and transferred between organizations. Originally, coding focused on causes of death and other outcomes. Such systems include the international classification of diseases (ICD). However, more recently the need to allow communication between health organizations has encouraged the development of standards such as health level seven (HL7). Further work has focussed on vocabularies such as systematic nomenclature of medical terms (SNOMED), which allow standardised recording of any health-related information. Coded data is necessary to allow computers to assist in decision making and for audit purposes. With the rapid development of computer networks and the Internet, there has been a growing effort to include semantic information with computer data so that the meaning of the data can be bound to the data store. The chapter discusses these standards and the areas that are undergoing rapid development.