Evaluating systemized nomenclature of medicine clinical terms coverage of complementary and integrative health therapy approaches used within integrative nursing, health, and medicine

The use of complementary and integrative health therapy strategies for a wide variety of health conditions is increasing and is rapidly becoming mainstream. However, little is known about how or if complementary and integrative health therapies are represented in the EHR. Standardized terminologies provide an organizing structure for health information that enable EHR representation and support shareable and comparable data; which may contribute to increased understanding of which therapies are being used for whom and for what purposes. Use of standardized terminologies is recommended for interoperable clinical data to support sharable, comparable data to enable the use of complementary and integrative health therapies and to enable research on outcomes. In this study, complementary and integrative health therapy terms were extracted from multiple sources and organized using the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health and former National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine classification structures. A total of 1209 complementary and integrative health therapy terms were extracted. After removing duplicates, the final term list was generated via expert consensus. The final list included 578 terms, and these terms were mapped to Systemized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms. Of the 578, approximately half (48.1%) were found within Systemized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms. Levels of specificity of terms differed between National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health and National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine classification structures and Systemized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms. Future studies should focus on the terms not mapped to Systemized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms (51.9%), to formally submit terms for inclusion in Systemized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms, toward leveraging the data generated by use of these terms to determine associations among treatments and outcomes.