Standardized quality assurance forms for organ transplantations with multilingual support, open access and UMLS coding.

ABSTRACT

Quality assurance (QA) is a key factor to evaluate success of organ transplantations. In Germany QA documentation is progressively developed and enforced by law. Our objective is to share QA models from Germany in a standardized format within a form repository for world-wide reuse and exchange. Original QA forms were converted into standardized study forms according to the Operational Data Model (ODM) and shared for open access in an international forms repository. Form elements were translated into English and semantically enriched with Concept Unique Identifiers from the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) based on medical expert decision. All forms are available on the web as multilingual ODM documents. UMLS concept coverage analysis indicates 92% coverage with few but critically important definition gaps. New content and infrastructure for harmonized documentation forms is provided in the domain of organ transplantations enabling world-wide reuse and exchange.