NHDD Pocket

The Federal Ministry of Health has developed the National Health Data Dictionary (NHDD) to serve as the authoritative source for indicator and information standards within the health system. The dictionary provides a common language for clinicians, lab technicians, pharmacists, researchers and administrators to communicate and exchange health information to ensure that meaning is not lost as data is shared or aggregated into reporting systems. The NHDD harmonizes data definitions from multiple programs and facilitates mapping of definitions to international standards, such as the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), the Systematized Nomenclature for Medicine (SNOMED-CT), or the Columbia International eHealth Laboratory (CIEL) interface terminology. The NHDD was initially populated with indicators and data definitions from the HMIS Data Recording and Reporting Guidelines, the NCoD, and CHIS Guidelines and mapped to ICD-10, SNOMED-CT and CIEL. Plans are being developed to promote adoption and to expand the NHDD to other prioritized domains.

The NHDD is hosted on an open-source terminology management service (TMS), the Open Concept Lab (OCL). OCL provides functionality to help the Ministry of Health and its partners to collaboratively manage, publish, and use its indicator and data definitions. The standards-based terminology management service also serves as a foundational component of the national eHealth architecture as defined in the Information Revolution. Within the eHealth architecture, the NHDD facilitates information exchange with other information systems by providing shared definitions to other information systems through an Application Program Interface (API).