In this post, I'll review the history behind value sets' turn in the health information technology spotlight and describe the NLM's VSAC, a great and growing resource for caregivers who use controlled vocabularies in applications and the developers and terminologists working behind the scenes.

The MedDRA Maintenance and Support Services Organization seeks user community feedback on a series of proposed changes to be included in an upcoming release. You can get more information about the changes by downloading

Yesterday, Health Level 7 sent a letter to the US Senate HELP Committee, which is thinking about interoperable electronic health records.

The latest edition of SNOMED CT and the SNOMED-CPT Mappings are available for Apelon Content Subscription customers who are still using DTS 3.5.2. 

Will you be attending the HIMSS AsiaPac and Digital Health Week meetings in Singapore next month? We will... so let's meet up... Drop us a line at sales@apelon.com. See you in Singapore!

Looking at MedDRA as a terminologist, I see some things I really like and some things I wish were different. We just overhauled the way we represent MedDRA in DTS, and the new schema helps DTS users take advantage of the good parts and more easily work around the rest.

Most departmental and enterprise electronic medical records operate with local, homegrown vocabularies, but as deadlines for exchanging information between healthcare providers grow closer, standardizing and mapping  local data sets using national standard terminologies becomes increasingly important, and taking steps to "clean up" local data will improve the quality and efficiency of the terminology mapping.

The Pharmacologic Class Work Group will be recognized at the 55th Annual FDA Honor Awards Ceremony with the FDA Commissioner's Special Citation. This award recognizes significant contribution or achievement that leads to improvements in service, programs, and/or communication for FDA.

Again this year, Apelon will be exhibiting at e-Health, Canada’s premier health information technology conference, held this year at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre from May 31 to June 3.

Our friends at West Coast Informatics recently announced their foray into the increasingy crowded landscape of entry-level terminology servers.

Apelon is looking forward to participating in the FHIR Connectathon to be held in conjunction with the upcoming HL7 Working Group Meeting in Paris.

Apelon congratulates Betsy Humphreys on her appointment as Acting Director of the National Library of Medicine.