Stream: snomed
Topic: Duplicate terminologies
Vivian Kristina (Oct 29 2019 at 21:43):
Hello there. We are students completing a project in the area of allergy management. Our project involves simplifying the current list of allergens in our electronic medical record (Epic) and ensuring that these are linked to our electronic menu management system (Delegate).
We are hoping that you could help us with a technical question we have encountered while doing this project. Currently, our allergens are coded with the SNOMED terminologies, as well as HL7 and RxNorm coding. Could you tell us a bit about what the difference between these codings are and whether they relate to one another?
We also found that there are many duplicate names of similar foods eg. tree nut and tree nuts, green bean and green beans
and we were unsure why this is.
We have contacted SNOMED international and they have mentioned that the terminologies they produce are singular, and that we should contact HL7 to inquire further.
Here are more examples of duplicates:
95323 TREE NUTS Tree Nuts Drug Class Food RxNorm 13577000
82953 TREE NUT tree nut Drug Ingredient Food RxNorm 13577000
84857 ENGLISH WALNUT English walnut Drug Ingredient Food RxNorm 256352005
85312 ENGLISH WALNUT HULL english walnut hull Drug Ingredient Food RxNorm 256352005
91088 ALBUMEN (EGG WHITE) albumen (egg white) Drug Ingredient Food RxNorm 256443002
91855 EGG WHITE egg white Drug Ingredient Food RxNorm 256443002
Thank you very much for your time and we look forward to hearing from you soon.
Kindest regards.
Grahame Grieve (Oct 29 2019 at 22:22):
Currently, our allergens are coded with the SNOMED terminologies, as well as HL7 and RxNorm coding
I'm not sure what you mean by "hl7 coding" there.
Grahame Grieve (Oct 29 2019 at 22:24):
regarding your RxNorm questions, these codes are differentiating between the item as a food directly, and it's use as an ingredient in other things. For medication use, those are pretty different concepts, but I think that in a menu management context, it's a more slippery distinction
Grahame Grieve (Oct 29 2019 at 22:25):
@Patrick McLaughlin (NLM) might want to say more about RxNorm than that
Vivian Kristina (Nov 04 2019 at 21:28):
@Grahame Grieve Thank you very much for your reply.
Robert McClure (Nov 16 2019 at 16:52):
I'm also confused by the question and listed examples. Perhaps you could explain what one of those lines is supposed to be telling us and where you obtained it?
Lin Zhang (Oct 11 2020 at 11:13):
@Vivian Kristina
You need to clarify these codes/concepts' source terminologies/vocabularies. Maybe they come from some local or vendor's terminologies/vocabularies. Clearly, some codes (e.g., 256352005) in your examples come from SNOMED CT, but others are from unknown sources (e.g., 84857) as the following instance shows:
84857 ENGLISH WALNUT English walnut Drug Ingredient Food RxNorm 256352005
Lin Zhang (Oct 11 2020 at 11:19):
@Robert McClure
@Grahame Grieve is right. Terminologically speaking, esp. in clinical terminologies such as LOINC, SNOMED CT and RxNorm, say, commonly called food and food ingredients are different although they likely have identical names/synonyms.
Robert McClure (Oct 11 2020 at 15:00):
@Lin Zhang Impressively old thread to be commenting on. I was trying to get some specifics on the lines provided, are you suggesting you know the details on these examples? The SCT concept Walnut - nut (substance)|256352005 is indeed representing the substance class for that object. Perhaps that is what you mean by "food ingredient" and I'd love to hear of a system matching food ingredients in a dietary ordering system to SCT. The code 84857 is not in RxNorm so not sure what that is supposed to mean. The RxNorm focus is drugs, so the aligned but very different thing is walnut allergenic extract| 314470. Aligning all this in a workflow-appropriate system is complicated and honestly, knowing the extract to use to determine allergic responsiveness (the allergenic extract) is pretty useless in the context of food-prep allergy avoidance.
Lin Zhang (Oct 11 2020 at 23:34):
The example line was taken from @Vivian Kristina 's original question. And I don't know their source(s). All those example lines don't include RxNorm codes although some text strings could be found in RxNorm.
SCT provides those substances (as the code you further confirmed) for allergens. And another closely related CodeSystem is LOINC, which provides a wide range of lab test codes for allergens.
Last updated: Apr 12 2022 at 19:14 UTC
