Apelon Distributed Terminology System (DTS)

The Apelon Distributed Terminology System (DTS) is an integrated set of components that provides comprehensive terminology services in distributed application environments. Currently in use in many leading healthcare organizations, DTS provides support for national and international data standards as well as local vocabularies, necessary foundations for comparable and interoperable health information. Typical applications for DTS include clinical data entry, results review, problem-list and code-set management, guideline creation, decision support and information retrieval.

Key DTS features include:

  •  HIGH-PERFORMANCE: Concurrent access to multiple, interconnected terminologies
  •  COMPREHENSIVE: Extensive terminology Knowledgebase with a unified, consistent object model
  •  DATA NORMALIZATION: Matching of text input to standardized terms and concepts via word order analysis, word stemming, spelling correction and term completion
  •  CODE TRANSLATION: Mapping of clinical data to standard coding systems such as ICD-9 and CPT®
  •  CLASS QUERIES: Hierarchy interrogation for decision support and outcomes analysis
  •  SEMANTIC NAVIGATION: Browsing of a rich set of hierarchical and non-hierarchical relationships between concepts for improved quality in data entry and information retrieval
  •  SEMANTIC CLASSIFICATION: Creation, management, and comparison of concept extensions which are consistent with formal semantic models such as that used in SNOMED CT®
  •  SUBSETTING: Creation of individualized subsets of terminologies using advanced Boolean logic techniques
  •  WORKFLOW: Management and tracking of modeling efforts in large, distributed projects
  •  LOCALIZATION: Addition of local concepts, synonyms, codes, properties, and inter-concept associations to connect local content to standard terminologies

DTS provides APIs and management applications for both Java and Microsoft .NET environments.  DTS in now available as an open source project on SourceForge. For more information, see the SourceForge DTS home page.