Concept Terms and Mappings

Owned by Ellen Ball
Last updated: Jun 03, 2020 by Andrew Kanter
2 min read

Concept Term

A concept term defines a medical coding term or OpenMRS concept dictionary term that could be mapped to a concept.   A medical coding term is used to represent a name from a standard medical code (ie.  SNOMED, ICD10, LOINC, etc).  OpenMRS concept dictionary terms are used to refer to concepts by concept_id or name of a concept in the concept dictionary (ie. CIEL, PIH, AMPATH, etc.).  

Here are some examples of concept terms (with concept source / term):

SNOMED CT /  38341003
WHO ICD 10 /  D64.9
PIH / Sickle-Cell Anemia
PIH /  7814
CIEL / 117703
LOINC / 36296-2
ICPC2 / B82

A concept term for PIH or CIEL mappings would only be used on one and only one concept.  These terms are only used on one concept.  You would never have 2 (or more) concepts in a concept dictionary with the same concept term when using the concept source of CIEL, PIH, or AMPATH.  For example, the concept term of "PIH: 7814" would only be associated with one concept.  On the PIH metadata server, the term "PIH: 7814" would be associated with concept id = 7814.   

SNOMED, LOINC, ICD10 codes could be assigned to multiple concepts.  The next section explains these examples.

Concept Mappings

A concept map connects a concept term to a concept.  

Concepts could use the same concept term.  For example, the ICD10 code "D64.9" is a concept term and is "mapped" to multiple concepts in the CIEL dictionary – "anemia", "severe anemia", "chronic anemia", "anemia due to infection", etc.  In ICD10, the definition is "Anemia, unspecified".  For the concept of anemia, the concept mapping would use the same mapping of "D64.9", but with the mapping type of "SAME-AS".  For "severe anemia", the same term would be mapped with the type of "NARROWER-THAN". 

SAME-AS / ICD 10 /  D64.9 / "Anemia"
NARROWER-THAN / ICD 10 /  D64.9 / "Severe Anemia"


A concept map with the concept type (SAME-AS) is used when there is one and only one use of a mapping in the concept dictionary.  This is used for PIH and CIEL mappings which should always be assigned a type of "SAME-AS".  A single concept could have many SAME-AS mappings ("CIEL: 117703", "PIH: Sickle-Cell Anemia", and "PIH: 7814").


SAME-AS / PIH / Sickle-Cell Anemia
SAME-AS / PIH /  7814
SAME-AS / CIEL / 117703