Standards acronyms, with the catch

Under ten items, on purpose. Each one is something you will hear in a meeting before anyone defines it.

1. HL7 v2. Pipe-delimited messages (ADT, ORU, etc.) moving data between hospital systems. The catch: still runs most core interfaces; also ancient, locally customised, and documented inconsistently. "We speak HL7" tells you almost nothing about which messages or triggers.

2. FHIR. JSON/XML resources over web APIs; the modern interoperability standard. The catch: "FHIR-compliant" can mean one read-only endpoint. Real implementations vary by resource, direction, and auth model. Coexists with v2 for years, not instead of it.

3. SNOMED CT. Clinical terminology for problems, findings, procedures. The catch: mapping free text or local codes to SNOMED is a project, not a checkbox. Licencing and national editions differ; your EHR's subset may not match the research dataset's.

4. LOINC. Standard codes for lab and clinical observations. The catch: the code you need may exist in six variants (serum vs plasma, different units). Always match the exact variant or comparisons break silently.

5. ICD-10-CA / ICD-10. Diagnosis and procedure coding for billing and epidemiology (CA denotes Canadian modification). The catch: clinical documentation and billing codes diverge regularly. The code on the claim is not necessarily what the clinician meant.

6. DICOM. Standard for medical imaging storage and transmission. The catch: PACS workflows, priors matching, and edge devices add layers DICOM alone does not solve. Integration meetings mention DICOM when images will not open, not when terminology is ambiguous.

7. C-CDA. Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture; XML clinical summaries (discharge summaries, continuity of care documents). The catch: structurally standard, semantically inconsistent. Documents validate and still parse wrong downstream because sections use local templates.

8. IHE. Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise; profiles that specify how standards combine for real workflows (e.g., radiology, patient identity). The catch: acronym-heavy and profile-specific. Useful when someone says "we are doing PIX/PDQ" and you need to know that is about patient matching, not lab codes.

9. OMOP. Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership common data model for research analytics across sites. The catch: a research harmonisation layer, not something your EHR exports natively. Mapping EHR data into OMOP is months of work, not an afternoon export.

Bookmark this before your first integration meeting. Look up the relevant row when an acronym appears, ask the catch out loud, and watch how quickly the conversation gets specific.