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Brighton & Sussex Medical School

Data standardisation

Data standardisation

Data standardisation is the critical process of bringing data into a common format, that allows for collaborative research, large scale analytics and sharing of tools and methodologies. Despite the growing use of standardised terminologies in healthcare, the same medical concept may be represented in a variety of ways from one setting to the next. This highlights the need for standardisation techniques to transform data contained within various datasets in various ways into a common format, as well as common representation.
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OMOP

The Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) Common Data Model (CDM) has become a widely adopted and exclusively used open community data standard to generate reliable results, thus addressing the issue of data standardisation.

OMOP CDM is designed to standardise the structure and content of observation data and to enable efficient analyses that can provide reliable evidence. One of the main ways this is used is when clinical texts from clinical notes, letters and reports is used for research – clinical information is extracted from text using computer algorithms and converted into standardised concepts. A key component of the OMOP CDM are the OHDSI standard vocabularies, used to organise and standardise medical terms to be applied across various clinical domains. OHDSI provides resources to convert a wide variety of datasets into the CDM as well as tools to use once the data is in this standardised format.

Further information about OHDSI and the OMOP CDM can be found below.

Find out more here >

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Code browsers

Here is a list of useful code browsers for drawing up code lists. Along with the links, you’ll also find brief instructions on how to use these sites when developing code lists.

NHS SNOMED browser

NHS Classifications browser
This has browsers for OPCS and ICD10 codes.

BNF Chapters browser
This website has a list of the BNF chapters and paragraphs. Click on a section and it will take you through to a page showing the specific chemicals included and has a link to ‘view all matching dm+d items’ which provides a list of specific medicines under that chapter/paragraph.

NHS BSA Prescription Cost Analysis data browser
Find SNOMED codes for medications by using the NHS BSA Prescription Cost Analysis data. It details all medications dispensed in England, including their SNOMED codes and BNF chapters as Excel files. These can be used to run searches to find all SNOMED codes for medications in a particular BNF chapter.