BS EN 12264:2005

What is BS EN 12264 - Categorial structures for systems of concepts about?  

BS EN 12264 establishes the characteristics and the conformance rules required to synthetically describe the organization and content of a terminological system in health. BS EN 12264 has been developed to allow the production of specific standards on categorial structures for particular healthcare subject fields with the minimum requirements to support the meaningful exchange of information. 

Note 1: BS EN 12264 has been developed for use as an integrated part of computer-based applications and for the electronic healthcare record. It would be of limited value for manual use. 

Note 2: BS EN 12264 itself is not suitable for or intended for use by individual clinicians or hospital administrators. 

Note 3: It is not the purpose of BS EN 12264 to standardize the end-user classification or to conflict with the concept systems embedded in national practice and languages. 

Note 4: BS EN 12264 is applicable to any healthcare terminology in any healthcare terminological system. 

Who is BS EN 12264 - Categorial structures for systems of concepts for?  

BS EN 12264 on categorial structures for systems of concepts is useful for: 

• Designers of specialized standard healthcare terminological categorial structures 
• Developers of healthcare terminological systems including classifications and coding systems 
• Producers of services for terminological systems and designers of software including applications for natural language processing 
• Information modelers, knowledge engineers, and standards developers building models for health information management systems 
• Developers of information systems that require an explicit system of concepts 

• Developers of mark-up standards for representation of healthcare documents 

Why should you use BS EN 12264 - Categorial structures for systems of concepts? 

Computer-based processing and interchange of medical or clinical information require various kinds of terminological systems of concepts to represent that information, such as controlled vocabularies, classifications, nomenclatures, terminologies, and thesauri, with or without coding schemes. 

BS EN 12264 specifies the terminology and categorical structure description to be used for systems of concepts. Field testing in several countries, revision, and integration have provided the comprehensive basis for BS EN 12264. 

BS EN 12264 benefits you to: 

• Facilitate the construction of new terminological systems in a regular form which will increase their coherence and expressiveness 
• Facilitate maintenance of terminological systems 
• Increase consistency and coherence of existing terminological systems 
• Allow systematic cross-references between items of different types of terminological systems 
• Facilitate convergence among terminological systems 
• Make explicit the overlap between different health care domains terminological systems 
• Provide elements for negotiation about the integration of different terminological systems into information systems between the respective developers 
• Enable the systematic evaluation of terminological systems