Common medical terminology comes of age, Part One: Standard language improves healthcare quality.

It has become abundantly clear that standards of recording clinical terms in human-readable, computer-processable format are indispensable. Controlled medical terminology is the missing link in health information standards (in fact, medical terminology can be viewed as the mother of all standards); its absence interferes with the business of healthcare and impedes the core processes of healing and maintaining health. Medicine has lacked the controlled common medical vocabulary that would enable universal sharing of data at the point of care and ensure reliable information for determining health intervention effectiveness. Simple clinical and code content alone has proven insufficient for healthcare enterprises to successfully manage the terminology problem; the "lexical runtime engine," formerly called a vocabulary server (VOSER), which manages the vocabulary ontology and serves up the relevant vocabulary to users of applications in the clinical environment, has recently become a reality.