Policy agenda for the next decade: creating a path for graceful evolution and harmonized classifications and terminologies used for encoding health information in electronic environments.

Health information management (HIM) professionals' involvement with disease classification and nomenclature in the United States can be traced back to the early 20th century. In 1914, Grace Whiting Myers, the founder of the association known today as the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), served on the Committee on Uniform Nomenclature, which developed a disease classification system based upon etiological groupings. The profession's expertise and leadership in the collection, classification, and reporting of health data has continued since then. For example, in the early 1960s, another HIM professional (a medical record librarian) served as the associate editor of the fifth edition of the Standard Nomenclature of Disease (SNDO), a forerunner of the widely used clinical terminology, Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT). During the same period in history, the medical record professionals working in hospitals throughout the country were responsible for manually collecting and reporting disease and procedure information from medical records using SNDO. Because coded data have played a pivotal role in the ability to record and share health information through the years, creating the appropriate policy framework for the graceful evolution and harmonization of classification systems and clinical terminologies is essential.