Design considerations for an ontology in the domain of organ failure and transplantation.

The Etablissement français des Greffes (EfG) is a national agency dealing with Public Health issues related to organ, tissue and cell transplantation in France. The evaluation of organ retrieval and transplantation activities, one of its missions, is supported by a national information system (IS). In order to facilitate data recording, to improve the quality of information and to prepare semantic interoperability with other information systems, the existing thesaurus of the EfG was audited, leading to the design a new terminological module devoted to the support of the domain ontology.

How should therapeutic information be transferred to users?

Without an efficient solution to the problems that prevent prescribers and consumers having easy access to published and unpublished evidence, Evidence-Based Medicine will never become a reality. Among the problems, dissemination of the summarized evidence is a major one. It involves representing the summarized evidence in a format that corresponds to the users' needs and knowledge, interpreting it within the context of other related evidence, putting it in perspective, and then delivering it physically to the users at the appropriate time.

Developing the ontological foundations of a terminological system for end-stage diseases, organ failure, dialysis and transplantation.

The Etablissement français des Greffes (EfG) is a state agency dealing with Public Health issues related to organ, tissue and cell transplantation in France. The evaluation of organ retrieval and transplantation activities, one of its missions, is supported by a national information system (EfG-IS). The EfG-IS is moving towards a new n-tier architecture comprising a terminology server for end-stage diseases, organ failure, dialysis and transplantation (EfG-TS).

Which coding system for therapeutic information in evidence-based medicine.

The coding of information in the computer representation of clinical trials is essential both for the rationalisation of the activities involved in the production of therapeutic information for evidence-based decision support and for the integration of the messages produced by these activities with clinical information and electronic patient record systems. There is no standard coding system available, however, so building on existing evaluations, we performed a simple semi-quantitative evaluation of ICD-10, CDAM, MEDDRA, MESH, READ, SNOMED and UMLS to provide objective criteria for the choice of a coding system. Inclusion and exclusion criteria for four clinical trials recorded in TriSum constituted the corpus of evaluation texts.