The role of the UMLS in ‘storing’ and ‘sharing’ across systems

We will argue that ‘sharing’, ‘re-use’, ‘re-purposing’, and ‘addition’ of health care information is difficult, intrinsically; that the best way to overcome the difficulty is to start doing it, as soon as possible, and that the UMLS Knowledge Sources provide the best place to start. We recommend that the UMLS be used as a default source of biomedical concept names and relationships, as a comprehensive, data-based, ‘reference model’, and as an example of a large, ecumenical, evolving, continuously updated source of re-usable health care information.