Legacy conversion of daily general practice data registries: from the Belgian thesaurus to a SNOMED-CT GP Refset

BACKGROUND: Currently, a national thesaurus is implemented in all seven Belgian GP Electronic Health Records (EHRs). It was developed 20 years ago and consists of 50.000 Dutch and French clinical terms which are linked to ICPC-2 and ICD-10. However, since 2009 this thesaurus has not been maintained and the Belgian government has chosen SNOMED-CT to be the health care reference terminology.QUESTIONS: Challenges are to preserve the existing data in the EHRs and to ensure data interoperability for continuity of care through all medical professionals. The aim was to convert the most used clinical... Mehr ...