The U.S. National Library of Medicine and standards for electronic health records: One thing led to another

Clement J McDonald; Betsy L Humphreys

doi:10.3233/ISU-210142

The U.S. National Library of Medicine and standards for electronic health records: One thing led to another

Inf Serv Use. 2022 May 10;42(1):81-94. doi: 10.3233/ISU-210142. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Clement J McDonald¹, Betsy L Humphreys²

Affiliations

¹ U.S. National Library of Medicine, USA.
² U.S. National Library of Medicine (retired), USA.

Abstract

When Donald A.B. Lindberg M.D. became Director in 1984, the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) was a leader in the development and use of information standards for published literature but had no involvement with standards for clinical data. When Dr. Lindberg retired in 2015, NLM was the Central Coordinating Body for Clinical Terminology Standards within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, a major funder of ongoing maintenance and free dissemination of clinical terminology standards required for use in U.S. electronic health records (EHRs), and the provider of many services and tools to support the use of terminology standards in health care, public health, and research. This chapter describes key factors in the transformation of NLM into a significant player in the establishment of U.S. terminology standards for electronic health records.

Keywords: Donald A.B. Lindberg M.D.; RxNorm; U.S. National Library of Medicine; electronic health records; health information exchange; logical observation identifiers names codes; systematized nomenclature of medicine.