Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center Medical Entities Dictionary Source Information

Web site
http://med.dmi.columbia.edu/

Authority
Medical Entities Dictionary (MED) was developed and is maintained by the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center and Columbia University.

Purpose
MED serves as a set of standard terms to represent and capture clinical data in electronic health records (EHR) systems.

Description
MED is organized as a polyhierarchical semantic network of medical entities. It contains over 100,000 terms from a variety of sources, including the UMLS Metathesaurus, ICD-9-CM, and LOINC.

Metathesaurus Scope
The Metathesaurus representation of MED includes only 3,000 MED terms. These terms are arranged polyhierarchically into seven groupings. The seven entity groupings are

1. Anatomic Structure
2. Conceptual Entity
3. Etiologic Agent
4. Event
5. Measureable Entity
6. Physical Object
7. Sampleable Entity

Audience
MED is used by clinicians, nurses, and other health professionals.

Metathesaurus Update Frequency
MED was last updated in the Metathesaurus in 2003.

Sites Consulted

1. Medical Entities Dictionary [Internet]. New York: Columbia University; [cited 2010 Feb 25]. Available from: http://med.dmi.columbia.edu/.