In vitro test programming at Vanderbilt

Demands being placed upon the medical community from several sources have initiated renewed interest in and immediate requirements for standardized nomenclature and terminology for use in medical reporting systems. These problems and their solutions provided the central focus of the Fourth Annual Conference of the Society of Nuclear Medicine. General sessions and workshops highlighted the demands being placed on medicine as well as some steps that have been taken to meet these demands. Representatives of twelve medical societies and academies met as an Ad Hoc Committee during the conference to review the needs and to consider steps necessary to develop a standardized computer-supported reporting system that would: bridge the growing gap between existing formal knowledge and bedside decisions; permit an organized presentation of clinical signal data; provide scientific definitions and current research findings to enable a clinician to retrieve scientific facts pertinent to his case; and provide the mechanism necessary for uniform peer review with sufficient feedback to upgrade medical case. This paper contains a report on the Fourth Annual Conference of Computer Medicine including some facts about this organization, some opinions, a brief review of presentations made concerning Standardized Languages, and a report on the Ad Hoc Committee meetings