Clinical administration procedures in the Read Thesaurus: extending the ENV 1828 model to support regional terminology requirements.

Documentation of the administrative aspects of clinical practice (fee claims, referrals, visits etc.) is essential and a controlled terminology for the electronic health care record needs to support this requirement. The Read Codes--used in the United Kingdom for over 10 years--include a chapter of administration terms for this purpose. The latest version, the Read Thesaurus, adopts a partially compositional approach to concept representation. We describe an extension of the ENV 1828 surgical procedure scheme developed as a provisional model to represent administrative procedures. Applicable concept fields, semantic links and modifiers are identified and compared. A compositional approach appears to provide a flexible and manageable method of representing administrative procedures, and readily accommodates regional variations.