IEEE and IHTSDO sign MoU

PISCATAWAY, USA & COPENHAGEN, DENMARK: IEEE, the world’s largest professional association advancing technology for the benefit of humanity, and the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO), the leading provider of standardized clinical terminology, announced a collaboration agreement that will encourage harmonization of terminology related to medical devices so as to better support clinical care.

"This agreement is an important step in improving integration of services at the point of care; enabling delivery of improved healthcare and patient safety by removing a barrier to reliable semantic interoperability,” said Elliot Sloane, the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society’s Director responsible for the 11073 medical device informatics standards. "It will bring benefits across the spectrum from self-managed fitness through to intensive care."

Standardized terminology is a key building block for modern information systems designed to meet the needs of patients and health care providers for the safe exchange of clinical information.

SNOMED Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) is a comprehensive, multi-lingual, terminology used by family doctors and other health care providers in many countries, with the goal of ensuring that health information is captured consistently, accurately, and reliably across the health system. Likewise, IEEE has developed a family of standards which make it possible to exchange and evaluate vital signs and other data between different medical devices. Increasingly, this information must also be available through patient’s health records.

“Collaboration between standards development organizations has the potential to help improve patient safety and quality of care by reducing overlaps and gaps between the various standards,” said Martin Severs, Chair of the IHTSDO Management Board. “IHTSDO looks forward to working in cooperation with IEEE and other standards bodies to achieve this."