Health Language Blog

EMR and other healthcare software applications must maintain dropdown lists of codes, which are regularly updated by the standard bodies. As a software vendor you need to ensure that you are monitoring for updates, analyzing each update to determine what actually changed, and then incorporating the updates and shipping updated code to all of your customers. In this blog, I discuss the challenge of managing codes and dropdown lists on your own, as opposed to using a terminology management solution to manage these frequent updates for you.

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Code groups and analytics initiatives—the two go hand-in-hand. Healthcare organizations are increasingly realizing that effective management of code groups (also known as value sets) is imperative for aligning with healthcare’s Triple Aim and positioning within the value based landscape.

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Whether you’re providing patient care or managing coding and patient data, you have no doubt felt the impact of managing code groups on your day-to-day responsibilities, whether you know it or not. The use of code groups, otherwise known as value sets, is becoming a necessity for healthcare providers – but the technology to manage them is only now just beginning to catch up with the need.  

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Code groups (also known as value sets ) are codes and terms taken from standard terminologies which are used to define clinical concepts.

In essence, code groups are collections of codes that represent such ideas as a category of drugs or a reportable disease. For example, a health system could group together all of the ICD-9, ICD-10, SNOMED-CT and RxNorm codes that could indicate patients with diabetes. In this case, “patients with diabetes” is the clinical concept defined by the code group.

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The Building Blocks of Clinical Rules

Code groups (also referenced as value sets) are just that: groups of codes that come from one or more standard vocabularies. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), value sets are used to define clinical concepts, such as “clinical visit” or a “reportable disease.”  The sets consist of codes expressed as numerical values and terms are taken from standard terminologies such as SNOMED CT, RxNorm, LOINC and ICD-10-CM. 

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