Lithuania's Update April 2009
National activities
In 2008, Lithuania’s major priorities were a pilot translation project, along with educational activities and licensing. We participated in the Translation, Education, and International Pathology & Laboratory Medicine SIGs, as well as the Technical and Research and Innovation Committees. We launched online licence registration, and we trained local IT experts and our translation team with the help of CAP STS, Carecom, and the Swedish National Release Centre.
Implementation plans and other activities
We have submitted a project of pilot pathology e-record integration with the National eHealth core, but it has not been approved by the authorities yet. Currently, patient summary, e-prescription, and surgical procedures are considered a priority in the national implementations. The National Centre of Pathology plans to implement a discrete “Unsatisfactory Specimen” subset in the QA module of its pathology information system, and so it is considering implementing SNOMED CT-enabled e-Cancer Checklists this year.
Affiliate activities
We issued five licenses for Lithuanian companies and institutions as of March 2009.
Translation plans and activities
We successfully completed a pilot translation of 3000 concepts of the top three levels of the hierarchies and a portion of CAP STS Anatomic Pathology subset into Lithuanian. The translation was performed by a local company “Fotonija” with sound experience in vocabularies, ontologies and translation projects, using the HealthTerms tool from CareCom. We developed a translation methodology for Lithuanian based on the emerging guidelines of the IHTSDO and experiences from Denmark, Sweden, and Canada, as well as experience from our pilot translation project. The plan is to continue low-scale translation (4000 concepts) in 2009 based on demands of Health Information Technology implementations. We highly appreciate IHTSDO’s quest for acquiring a Workbench and Translation Tool.
