ANF provides a precise specification for modeling clinical statements that is comparable and sharable between multiple care providers, health enterprises, and standards-based Healthcare Information Technology (HIT) systems.
ANF does not define the terminology specification but relies on terminology knowledge to specify the meaning of clinical statements.ANF supports pre-coordinated and post-coordinated terminology expressions to provide greater content coverage than can be achieved by relying only on pre-coordinated concepts. Post-coordinated compositional terminologies are more expressive and can achieve better analysis than can be achieved by relying only on pre-coordinated concepts. Successful analysis requires appropriate data quality necessary for systems to define a precise topic, type, and clear measure or result to be captured at the exact level of meaning of what was observed, requested, or assessed during treatment. ANF can be applied to any input data and any formalism as long as the data semantics and terminology are sufficiently precise to define the elements mandatory for analysis.