The OntoReason Health Ontology provides an explicit formal specification of the conceptual health care domain. This formal specification inherits an object model from the HL7 Reference Implementation Model (RIM). Our object model implements the healthcare concepts as acts and entities and instantiates the complex relationships that hold among them. The ontology systematically organizes healthcare concepts of a specific health domain sector into reusable class objects. These objects are populated using Consolidated Health Informatics (CHI) coding systems mandated by law for the Federal Health Architecture and recommended for use in clinical healthcare systems by the National Center for Vital Health Statistics (NCVHS).

OntoReason has designed a series of Access Services to provide domain relevant queries into the ontology and allow applications to leverage the relevant domain knowledge represented within the ontology. These services save hundreds of analysis, design and implementation hours for each application that would be required to define vocabulary concepts, value sets and the means to distribute the vocabulary elements. The Ontology Access Queries provide applications with simple and effective ways to extract and reason about the conceptual knowledge represented within the ontology without having to develop and implement them within a specific application.

The OntoReason Public Health Ontology ensures compliance with national standards; reduces maintenance cost; assures up to date releases of code systems and vocabularies; and reduces development and deployment time.