Use of the Unified Medical Language System in patient care at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.

The Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) project at the United States National Library of Medicine contains and organizes a large number of terms from controlled medical vocabularies. This study examines the suitability of the UMLS for representing patient care information as it exists in the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center (CPMC) clinical information system. Comparisons were made between the semantic types, semantic relations and medical concepts of the UMLS and the data model entities, semantic classes, semantic relations and concepts in the CPMC system. Results of the comparison demonstrate that the UMLS structural model is appropriate for representing CPMC vocabularies and patient data and that the UMLS concepts provide excellent coverage of CPMC concepts in many areas. Recommendations are made for enhancing UMLS structure to provide additional coverage of the CPMC model. It is concluded that content expansion to provide better coverage of clinical terminology is possible within the current UMLS model.