What is ISO 17115 about?
ISO 17115 is an international standard that discusses the aspects of health informatics.
ISO 17115 serves the purpose to define a set of basic concepts required to describe formal concept representation systems, especially for health sciences. It describes the representation of concepts and characteristics, for use, especially in formal computer-based concept representation systems.
ISO 17115 describes the characteristics which synthetically describe the organization and content of a terminological system in health and supports the development of specific standards on categorial structures for particular healthcare subject fields with the minimum requirements to support the meaningful exchange of information.
Note 1: Topics considered outside the scope of ISO 17115 include:
- Enumeration of axiomatic concepts and semantic links
- Detailed content of health terminology systems (classifications, nomenclatures, or reference terminology of health concepts)
Note 2: ISO 17115 is not suitable for, or intended for use, by individual clinicians or hospital administrators.
Note 3: It is not the purpose of ISO 17115 to standardize the end-user classification or to conflict with the concept systems embedded in national practice and languages.
Who is ISO 17115 for?
ISO 17115 on the representation of categorial structures of terminology is useful for:
- Public Health care organizations
- Nursing organizations
- Data analysis companies for hospitals
- Medical and biomedical organizations
- Bioinformatics companies
Why should you use ISO 17115?
Health terminology is complex and multifaceted, more so than most language domains. Computer-based processing and interchange of medical or clinical information, use various kinds of terminological systems of concepts to represent information, such as controlled vocabularies, classifications, nomenclatures, terminologies, and thesauri, with or without coding schemes.
A domain-specific semantic model has been envisioned and applied in ISO 17115 on various subject fields to describe a set of categorical structures.
ISO 17115 lays out numerous uses for its implementers like describing formal definitions, parts of definitions and how they are related, and patterns for concept representation in a particular domain. It also enables you the systematic evaluation of terminological systems
ISO 17115 also facilitates the construction of new terminological systems in a regular form which will increase their coherence and expressiveness as well as maintenance of terminological systems. It helps the users to increase the consistency and coherence of existing terminological systems.
ISO 17115 allows systematic cross-references between items of different types of terminological systems. It facilitates convergence among terminological systems and makes explicit the overlap between different health care domains terminological systems. It provides you with the elements for negotiation about the integration of different terminological systems into information systems between the respective developers.
What’s changed since the last update?
BS ISO 17115:2020 supersedes BS ISO 17115:2007, which is withdrawn. BS ISO 17115:2020 includes some technical changes with respect to BS ISO 17115:2007. These include:
- Change in title and expansion of the scope
- Reference to the ISO 17117 series which has further developed terms, definitions, and characteristics of healthcare terminologies
- Inclusion of requirements for categorial structures to support the key purpose of standardization and clarification of terminologies in healthcare
