Apelon creates semantic frameworks and offers interoperability guidance to national and regional government agencies in the US and around the world. 

Some of the most important and cutting-edge work in health data sharing and standards adoption has come from government initiatives in the US and elsewhere. Governments have been able to make the case for interoperability more easily than many private entities, since the responsibility for improved health outcomes ultimately falls to the public sector. Implementing a semantic framework based on standard terminology and message standards can improve care and reduce waste, making the most of every taxpayer dollar, peso or pound.

In the US, we’ve worked for Federal Agencies including the Department of Veterans Affairs, National Library of Medicine, National Cancer Institute, the NIH Clinical Center, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and many others. Outside the US, we’ve been active in Canada, Australia, Hong Kong, Rwanda, the Philippines and more. Download our GSA Schedule to seee how easy it is for US Government agencies to do business with Apelon. 

Contact us to learn more about how we can help your agency leverage the power of structured vocabulary at the local, regional or national level.

Over the years, Apelon has helped create and manage SNOMED CT, ICD-9-CM, ICD-10-CM, and many more. We can help you manage your internal terminology needs, too.

The best answer is to just use an externally produced standard terminology… why reinvent the wheel? One answer we hear over and over is that the available wheels just don’t fit. Your business has unique aspects, legacy processes, and user expectations that today’s vocabularies can’t manage, so you’ve built your own. 

We’ve been doing terminology for a long time: from our early days building the Unified Medical Language System for the US National Library of Medicine to our work on niche vocabularies for cancer research, eye care and other specialties, to our long partnerships with the care providers who use standards in their practice, we’ve developed a wealth of experience and expertise.

Today, our consulting team can put that expertise to work for you. We can help you extend an existing standard, integrate your legacy ontologies, or build a new international standard from scratch. We offer services to optimize each phase of the terminology development lifecycle. And, because we aren’t tied to a particular software system (our flagship DTS is open source and freely available), you can count on us to give you unbiased advice.

Apelon can help you solve your product’s terminology problem with terminology server software, strategic planning, and client provisioning.

Smart use of standard terminology and information standards is emerging as a key differentiator among electronic medical records vendors. Whether you offer a do-it-all hospital-based EMR or an outpatient specialty product, your users expect their documentation to be standards-compliant for interoperability and analytics. At the same time, the system must be easy to use, and must fit intuitively within an existing practice.

One of the easiest ways to lose a user… or a potential user… is to make them decipher your developers’ acronyms, misspellings, and proprietary jargon. Instead, you need to show them industry-standard terminology where it matters… for interoperability, population health, and analytics applications… and also show them a customizable, clinician-friendly interface for data capture and patient communications.

We can help you do both. Apelon’s terminology and interoperability solutions and our experienced consulting team can help you set up and sustain a semantic infrastructure that links the easy-to-use part with the consistent, interoperable part. We’ll show you how to combine today’s powerful clinical terminologies (including SNOMED CT, LOINC, RadLex, and others) with required billing and electronic data interchange codes (ICD-9-CM, ICD-10-CM, UB-04) and clinician-friendly interface terms in ways that turn your electronic data from an expensive headache to a powerful patient engagement asset.

Health Information Exchanges make it possible to share health information. Apelon makes that information meaningful with standard terminologies.

How? Mapping!

Mapping — if locally collected lab results, medication orders, allergy info and other key patient data points are connected a standard terminology, then every health information exchange participant gets maximum value. If the goal is to reduce duplicate care, it’s imperative to know what care has already been delivered. If the goal is to identify high-risk or high-utilization patients, you need to identify conditions and usage patterns across the entire health system. One way is to simply memorize every datum on every patient, and of course every idiosyncratic turn of phrase used in every record. Another way is to create a targeted mapping from local codes to standards. If you think that might be easier, Apelon offers tools and services ranging from assistance with legacy spreadsheet catalogs (take a look at TermWorks), to TermManager, a Web-based mapping system for small and midsize projects to facilitation of your high-volume real-time mappings using Symedical.

Ok, We’ll Take One…

While there are many mappings available, there’s no single “right” mapping for all uses, because the terminologies reflect the flexibility of the language, and different words are appropriate in different contexts. Apelon’s professional services team can help guide you through the process of selecting and implementing a prebuilt mapping, as well as to customize that map to meet your needs. 

Of course, we also have a team of clinical informatics professionals… pharmacists, medical technologists, physicians, and more… who can do the mapping for you.