A Collaboration Framework for Mapping Taiwan National Health Insurance Codes into Logical Observation Identifier Names and Codes

摘要

The purpose of this paper is to build a database for transformation of Taiwan BNHI codes into the LONIC ones. In Taiwan, hospitals use local codes to report their laboratory data. Using the local codes for exchanging of the laboratory data makes different systems unable to understand and reuse the exchanged data. The BNHI codes are used for insurance claims, and they are adopted by all hospitals in Taiwan. For this reason, BNHI codes are the best choice as an intermediate tool for mapping local codes into the LONIC ones. In this paper, we proposed a method of building an NHI-LOINC database. First, we transform the Chinese clinic laboratory names into the corresponding English component names, which in turn will be searched by RELMA (a search engine). The RELMA search engine will use them for searching the LOINC database, and generating a set of LONIC codes corresponding to the NHI codes. Thus the NHI-LONIC database can be created. The database can be used for facilitating the mapping of the local hospital codes into the corresponding LONIC codes.