There is a lot going on in health care on the national level these days. Between the Affordable Care Act and the ICD-10 coding classification transition alone, the federal government’s chief health information officer, Michael McCoy, M.D., is a busy guy. But what is on his mind? What are his concerns? Health Leader’s Media brought this interesting information to our attention in their article, “Population Health Priorities from ONC’s Own Dr. McCoy.”

Population health. Dr. McCoy and Health and Human Services (HHS) have several big picture projects that focus on the greater health of our country’s citizens. One of them includes semantic interoperability. The ability to gather large amounts of quality data is dependent on having the right information about the individuals. Semantic technology applies natural language processing to be sure of the meaning.

Natural language processing presents solutions for handling structured and unstructured data to achieve the ultimate in findability. Information being findable is also the result of good indexing and comprehensive metatagging. Automated indexing is a comprehensive approach to making content findable. Access Innovations is one of a very small number of companies able to help its clients generate ANSI/ISO/W3C-compliant taxonomies with integrated indexing rule bases to make their information findable.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.