AllergyMap: An Open Source Corpus of Allergy Mention Normalizations

Area of Science:

• Medical Informatics
• Clinical Data Management
• Ontology Development

Background:

• Allergy mention normalization is difficult due to diverse allergen types (medications, foods, etc.).
• Free-text allergy data in electronic health records (EHR) presents significant challenges for standardization.
• Migrating and mapping this data to new EHR systems requires careful consideration of data quality and consistency.

Purpose of the Study:

• To describe the process of mapping free-text allergy information from an existing EHR to standard terminologies.
• To migrate this normalized allergy data into a new enterprise EHR system.
• To identify and address challenges encountered during the mapping and migration of allergy data.

Main Methods:

• Reviewing and mapping free-text allergy entries from a university hospital's EHR.
• Developing a standardized mapping (AllergyMap) between free-text allergy medications and non-proprietary ontologies.
• Migrating the processed allergy data into a new enterprise EHR system.

Main Results:

• The mapping and migration process revealed significant issues and challenges with free-text allergy data.
• A novel mapping resource, AllergyMap, was created and is now publicly available.
• This work provides foundational insights for future free-text allergy data mapping and migration efforts.

Conclusions:

• Effective allergy mention normalization requires robust mapping strategies.
• The developed AllergyMap serves as a valuable public resource for allergy data standardization and system evaluation.
• Guidelines for future data migration projects can be informed by the challenges and findings of this study.