Portuguese Catalogue for Malignant Neoplasms
The oncological disease is having an exponential growth, is predicted that this will be the major death cause in the next 16 years, as the life expectancy grows the population gets older.
The major goal for the Oncologists and the other healthcare professionals involved, is to assure that the patients have access to the most accurate and updated therapeutics on time.
In this context, it is significant that also the diagnoses are registered in a standard way, allowing the exchange of data between the health professionals, decreasing the margin of errors due to interpretation of distinctive codification or terminology. This will also optimize the health data storage, consultation, analysis and interpretation and comparison.
In order to standardize the language used between the different health professionals (Oncologists and Anatomopathologists), the Ministry of health Shared Services in partnership with the Health General Directorate and the Pathology Services inserted in the National Bank Tumours Network as began a project aiming the creation of a standard subset of terms to classify and share the information regarding to the malignant tumours, allowing it to be also understandable cross borders.
The project under development comprises:
- The creation of a reference set of terms for the malignant tumours diagnoses, to be shared between all the entities involved in oncological field;
- Standardize the SNOMED CT version in use by the entities;
- Mapping between the ICDO-O-3 and SNOMED CT, allowing the cross boarder exchange of data
Currently the undergoing work is dedicated only to the malignant tumours diagnoses (malignant neoplasms), aiming to include in the future data regarding the benign neoplasms.
