ELSEWER SCIENCE IRELAND International Journal of Bio-Medical Computing 34 (1994) 207-237 Comput ing The role of the UMLS in ‘storing’ and ‘sharing’ across systems Mark S. Tuttle*“ , Stuart J. Nelsonb “Lexical Technology. Inc. 1000 Atlantic Ave., Suite 106 Alameda, CA 94501, USA hMedical College of Georgia, Augusta, GA, USA Abstract We will argue that ‘sharing’, ‘re-use’, ‘ re-purposing’, and ‘addition’ of health care informa- tion is difficult, intrinsically; that the best way to overcome the difficulty is to start doing it, as soon as possible, and that the UMLS Knowledge Sources provide the best place to start. We recommend that the UMLS be used as a default source of biomedical concept names and relationships, as a comprehensive, data-based, ‘reference model’, and as an example of a large, ecumenical, evolving, continuously updated source of re-usable health care information. Key wovds: Medical record linkage; Unified Medical Language System (UMLS); Semantics; Medical records systems, computerized; Classification; Reference model The line between deeply held belieJi and prejudice is (I nurro~ one. - Anon. 1. Overview A computer-based patient record system ought to ‘store’ information about patients for later retrieval and it ought to allow that stored information to be ‘shared’ across systems. For example, if two care-givers, say a pediatrician and a child psychiatrist, describing the same problem in the same patient, can recognize their observations and test results in one another’s paper records, then a computer- based representation of those descriptions ought to support attempts to do the same thing algorithmically. We view the latter as a necessary requirement for ‘storing’ and ‘sharing.’ There are no ‘sufficient’ requirements for health care information sharing and ‘re-use.’ For the present, we would be satisfied if even a small part of the available * Corresponding author 0020-7101/94/$07.00 0 1994 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved. &WI 0020-7101(94)0091 I-Z