To new users, the CMT will be licensed under the Apache Version 2 open source license. Copies should be available by November from the National Library of Medicine.
“The purpose of putting this into the open source world is so that we can all have the same terminology in EHRs and PHRs,” says John Mattison, chief medical informatics officer for Kaiser Permanente/Southern California.
One goal, Mattison says, was to create a longitudinal health record for each patient, but the “ultimate, ultimate objective of this donation is to help create the collaborative environment to contribute to a single common terminology.”
Say, for example, a clinician documents a patient encounter in clinical language he or she is accustomed to using. Passing through CMT, those elements of the patient records are recorded in the clinician's electronic health record in that same clinical language, but also are mapped to the appropriate, machine-readable codes, such SNOMED, CPT or ICD-9. CMT also translates the doctor's orders into plain English for use by a patient in instructions or in their personal health record.
Philip Fasano, Kaiser's chief medical information officer, says Kaiser was “effectively contributing a dictionary of synonyms.”
“We've already seen interest in a lot of technology providers to get access to it,” Fasano says. Provider organizations are hot on it, too, Mattison says, which is why he says he's confident, CMT eventually will have sufficient numbers of users to become an industry norm.
Kaiser Permanente has 36 hospitals and 450 clinics in nine states and the District of Columbia, already a good start. But the Veterans Affairs Department dwarfs Kaiser with nationwide network of 153 hospitals and 768 clinics, and “the VA has agreed to be the first participant in this collaboration,” Mattison says.
Speaking of Kaiser and the VA, in yesterday's blog post about the Oct. 6 Senate committee hearing on VA IT systems, Allscripts Chief Executive Officer Glen Tullman slammed the MUMPS database and programming language on which the VA's VistA EHR system was written.
“No one's using MUMPS to build systems that communicate and exchange data efficiently today in anywhere else but the U.S. government,” Tullman said.
Technically, that might be correct in that MUMPS isn't being used to build the data interchanges being tested between the VA and Kaiser.
In fact, both the VA and Kaiser's EHR from Epic Systems Corp. run on MUMPS.
Fasano says the VA and Kaiser have achieved “complete interoperability,” and “within a few minutes” of a provider submitting a query there is a response.
