Solor

Solor is a program/initiative that spans across the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Solor defines an Integrated Knowledge Architecture which aims to enable accurate and coordinated encoding of health information by providing a foundation for reliable data governance and knowledge management. This Integrated Knowledge Architecture disambiguates how electronic health information is encoded in its format (e.g., FHIR), content (e.g., CIMI model), and semantics (e.g., standard terminologies), as well as its assertional and procedural knowledge (i.e., rules and logical relations). For Terminology Knowledge, Solor begins as a formal integration of SNOMED CT, LOINC, and RxNorm. This integrates the description logic as well as the content without redundancy. This integration provides formal and systematic documentation of how to use these three terminological resources together. The integration makes using these terminologies in a single logic model both more clear and less likely to cause ambiguity as it removes multiple methods to say the same thing (e.g., a drug name being coded in SNOMED CT and RxNorm). The terminology is coded using universal unique identifiers (UUIDs). This provides several advantages in maintaining the terminology as it will not reuse these meaningless identifiers. Solor integrates both the content and semantics associated with all three terminological models. The implementation allows local/regional/national extensions to improve flexibility. Some groups in the Department of Veterans Affairs are working to add new relationships to the model.