The Health IT Standards Committee has approved a single set of terminology standards for each area of quality reporting measures, an achievement that has been ten years in the making. The areas include prescribed drugs, labs as well as allergies.

Over the past month, the committee has modified the proposals of two of its work groups to require the lowest number of vocabulary standards, primarily SNOMED-CT, LOINC or RxNorm.

The Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT) is really a standard medical vocabulary for use in electronic health records (EHRs) for sharing data across specialties and sites of care.

The Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC) is utilized for lab and clinical identifiers. And RxNorm is actually a standard for the names for clinical medications and drug delivery devices manufactured by the National Library of Medicine.

For example, SNOMED will probably be used to describe condition or diagnosis, matters in the patient and physician encounter, communications and the adverse effect brought on by drugs.