VIVO-1104: Ensure that physician specialties (board certifications) and expertise are enabled via the ISF

[chenejac]

Paul Albert (Migrated from VIVO-1104) said:

Moved to this Jira from [https://issues.library.cornell.edu/browse/VIVOONT-440] and https://issues.library.cornell.edu/browse/VIVOONT-430
Board certifications - the medical specialties and subspecialties issued by various ABMS member boards. For me, the only questions are:

• How should these data be modeled?
• We need an external controlled vocabulary be used for these data... right? This will allow any instance of VIVO, no matter the version to stay current with the latest updates to this list. Couldn't Weill Cornell or whoever just host its own RDF/XML file? There are only a couple dozen elements, and it would only need to be updated every year, if that. And if the ABMS ever wants to take it over, more power to them.

Paul's comment 1/11/12 on https://issues.library.cornell.edu/browse/VIVOONT-430
Specialties
Specialties are meant to represent branches of medical science. A provider’s set of specialties aims to answer the question of What type of doctor are you? Each set is comprised of manually selected terms combined with the specialties under which they are board-certified. The board certifications are obtained from the Office of Faculty Affairs. The majority of our providers have board certifications from the ABMS (on their site you can see a comprehensive list of specialties for which they provide certifications). The specialty terms used in our CMS comes from a proprietary lexicon by IMO (Intelligent Medical Objects), which is heavily derived from SNOMED CT. I am fine with referring this data as “Clinical Specialties.”

Clinical Expertise
Our expertise terms are meant to encode specific health problems or medical procedures. They are manually assigned to the doctors’ profiles by the doctors or their administrative staff. The prospect of programmatically assigning these terms to our providers based on their clinical histories is something being researched by Victor Brodsky and Tru Tran in POIS, and is not implemented in production. The terminology also comes from IMO’s proprietary lexicon. I would object to calling these “Clinical Subspecialties” because “subspecialties” has an established connotation (as can be seen on the ABMS website) of “a specialty within a specialty” which does not match our usage.

 

This is openrif/vivo-isf-ontology#750

 

[chenejac]

Jon Corson-Rikert said:

3/20/12 comment from Janos Hajagos, Stony Brook (via ontology list)
I saw on the agenda for tomorrow's is an item about coding medical/board specialties. There is a healthcare provider taxonomy code set which is designed for this purpose.

"Meeting one or more of the following provides additional business justification of the need for a unique code: American Board of Medical Specialties (ABMS) and/or American Osteopathic Association certification exists. Accreditation Counsel for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) – accredited residency or subspecialty training program
Existence of a nationally recognized specialty board, or a specialty defined by a subspecialty certification or a certificate of special competence issued by such a board or a nationally recognized accrediting body, or recognized by a regulatory agency
Demand for services is such that a significant number of providers choose to limit their practice to that specialty
The specialty is based on major new concepts in health science having broad professional support
The specialty is a distinct and well-defined new field of health care that entails special concern with the problems of a specific patient group, organ system, disease entity, or health care procedure"
from http://www.nucc.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=14&Itemid=40.
The codes can be downloaded as CSV:

http://www.nucc.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=107&Itemid=57

As this it is a taxonomy it could easily be converted into skos. The one remaining question to me is whether the codes are copyrighted and if so can they incorporated into VIVO?

-Janos

[chenejac]

Jon Corson-Rikert said:

This issue does not currently address the Weill global health specialties, which seem best handled as a local SKOS vocabulary

[chenejac]

Jon Corson-Rikert said:

Can this be resolved or is additional work needed (e.g., in importing a list of specialties in the ABox)?

Brian, please review and either resolve/close or reformulate listing the appropriate tasks for 1.7

[chenejac]

Jon Corson-Rikert said:

BJL 3/17/14 looks like they did not make it in -- we need URLs for the specific certification individuals, or they may be hidden somewhere that may not be obvious to us. We need to consult with Shahim or Melissa on how to use the structure that is there and populate the necessary individual instances to be consistent with eagle-i and the ISF repository in Google.

[chenejac]

Mike Conlon said:

Email to Paul Albert 7/23/17.  Is this still of interest?

[chenejac]

Paul Albert said:

Thanks for following up on this, Mike. This is not a front-burner issue for us. That may or may not change the ultimate value of adding this. But if I'm asking for development contributions, this wouldn't be at the top of my list.