Overview
ISO 21564:2025 - Health informatics: Terminology resource map quality measures and requirements (MapQual) defines quality requirements and measurable determinants for creating, assessing and maintaining maps between terminological resources (code systems). The standard helps organizations quantify map quality and utility, determine conformance levels for specific use cases, and guide decisions on whether and how to build or adopt a map set. It updates and replaces the earlier technical specification and is produced by ISO/TC 215 (Health informatics).
Keywords: ISO 21564:2025, MapQual, health informatics, terminology mapping, map quality measures, code systems mapping.
Key topics and technical requirements
- Determinants of map quality: The document organizes map quality into determinants covering resource capacity, equivalence, map set construction, governance and maintenance. These include items such as common categorial structure, shared semantic domain, language/translation, equivalence identification and assessment, outliers, and currency of the map.
- Map development and documentation: Requirements for clear purpose statements, methodology documentation, tools used, workforce, business arrangements, and validation/consensus processes to support reproducible, auditable mapping.
- Governance and maintenance: Expectations for ongoing governance, versioning and map maintenance to manage currency and long‑term utility.
- Use-case driven conformance: Measures are framed to assess map suitability for common healthcare use cases (e.g., direct patient care, administrative/financial planning) and to indicate expected conformance levels for safety-sensitive applications.
- Practical measurement: Provides a framework to quantify map quality and to compare maps objectively rather than relying on ad hoc or undocumented approaches.
Keywords: map governance, map maintenance, equivalence assessment, map validation, terminological resources.
Practical applications - who uses ISO 21564:2025
- Health IT vendors and EHR integrators selecting or building code system mappings (e.g., between SNOMED CT, ICD-10, LOINC).
- Health information and data managers assessing map fitness for purpose and procurement officers specifying map quality requirements.
- Mapping teams (terminologists, coders, clinicians, epidemiologists) designing reproducible mapping processes and validation workflows.
- Researchers and decision‑makers who need to evaluate the reliability of mapped datasets for analytics or safety‑critical uses.
Keywords: EHR mapping, clinical mapping, terminologists, data managers, procurement.
Related standards and references
- ISO/TR 12300 (basis for this document)
- ISO/TS 17117-2 (referenced terminology)
- Produced by ISO/TC 215 - aligns with broader health informatics standardization.
Using ISO 21564:2025 (MapQual) enables evidence‑based decisions on mapping investments, improves interoperability risk management, and supports safer reuse of coded health data across systems and purposes.
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