EVS supports a broad community of users, growing from its core mission of meeting NCI terminology needs to also support community-driven standards for data exchange and interoperability in clinical trial, research and other activities. Over the last dozen years, this community has contributed to EVS content, technology, and dissemination, achieving results beyond what the individual participants could have achieved separately. The primary EVS website is an informational site with links to the other EVS tools and browsers and to multiple downloadable files.
This document briefly outlines EVS resources; collects available statistics, for NCI and related systems, to capture the level, composition, and nature of use; and then provides more operational details, user profiles and other information, including top users of specific resources. Each section focuses on a particular topic, with selected highlights gathered here.
User Profiles
- EVS terminology content, standards and technology are adopted and actively used by many organizations and communities, including Clinical trial programs, TCGA Content, caNanoLab, and the NIH.
- Numerous academic, research, and even commercial organizations are also using and extending the capabilities of LexEVS and other EVS tools, for use throughout their organizations and for the development of commercial products.
Shared Terminology Development
- NCIt has been adopted by FDA, CDISC, NCPDP and other partners as a shared framework for developing terminology standards, allowing participants to compare and harmonize with each other's content while taking advantage of full-text definitions, codes, and other features.
Use of EVS Servers
- Top users of the EVS servers include NCI (CBIIT and others), various parts of NIH, FDA, and many universities and biomedical companies.
Use of EVS Content on Select Non-EVS Servers
- FDA-hosted files and mail lists are used by tens of thousands of users for EVS supported FDA terminology standards, used on FDA internal servers for coding and validation of tens of thousands of data submissions each month.
- CDISC server registered downloads include users from SDTM organizations, and users from organizations for CDASH.
- NLM redistributes NCI Thesaurus to its UMLS users, and gets hits monthly on its DailyMed SPL files, all using EVS maintained SPL terminology.
Use of EVS Tools
- EVS software is available as open source for community code contributions and reuse.
- EVS has supported Mayo Clinic development of the LexEVS terminology servers, now being deployed at MD Anderson, Stanford, Emory, Ohio State University Medical Center, Georgetown University, Washington University, and National Cancer Research Institute (NCRI)/UK CancerGrid, as well as IBM and GE Healthcare.
