Terminology Manager Skill (TMS) Levels

can we indicate when/ where we need TMS skills in the community? is it at the implementer stage? development stage to work with the developers?

This is a draft document to outline a straw man for grading different levels of terminology management skills paralleling the developer levels already under development for OpenMRS. The purpose of the TMS levels is to provide an easy framework for assessing where a terminology manager might fit in the management process outlined on the Meta-Data and Terminology Lead page.

TMS Level 0

These are consumers of terminology and not managers. They are primarily users who might have a particular requirement for a term or code but who have no actual experience coding or mapping. TMS Level 0's might request additional terms or codes from a terminology server or service. An example would be a clinician user of OpenMRS who searches and can't find a term in the database or via the OpenMRS UI.

TMS Level 1

These are users of terminology who actually have to create structured data forms or otherwise construct reports or data collection objects that require codified or standardized structured terminology. Examples are form developers who understand about different types of questions which would have different types of structured classes of data.

TMS Level 2

These users and or implementers typically do not have any formal terminology training or experience. They are able to understand basic concepts around classes and data types of terminologies and appropriate code set maps. They are able to browse a formal terminology like SNOMED or LOINC, "map" a concept in their medical record to a terminology, and search using tools like the Open Concept Lab (OCL). This would include knowing when a data element required a map to a procedure and not mapping it to a term in a different domain (e.g., problem).

TMS Level 3

These managers are familiar with the concepts around a controlled medical terminology but have limited experience curating or editorializing a dictionary for general distribution. They have experience managing their own dictionary and are fairly easily able to map local requirements for forms and reports to the dictionary and/or to standard terminologies like SNOMED and LOINC. They can generate a terminology use case based on their identified needs.

TMS Level 4

These managers have had several years of terminology management experience. They understand the differences between administrative, reference and interface terminologies. They are able to manage a controlled medical terminology with a proper editorial policy, unambiguous and non-redundant concepts/terms, etc. They usually work under the supervision of a TMS Level 5, but in smaller scale implementations might be primarily responsible for managing a dictionary shared with others.

TMS Level 5

These are the highest level of terminology managers. They are those with many years of terminology experience and who have either built or help manage source terminologies like LOINC, CIEL, SNOMED, etc. They are probably well aware of different use cases for terminology including data collection, aggregation (HIE) and reporting/analytics.