CPARA

The World Allergy Organization (www.worldallergy.org) estimates that hypersensitivity diseases affect about 30-40% of the world’s population, with both the severity and complexity of these entities increasing exponentially.In Portugal it is estimated that more than 2 million people have some form of allergy, from mild to very serious clinical conditions or even death. Those clinical manifestations may occur at any age.
 
In an increasingly global world, the importance of correct registration and sharing of clinical information and the standardization of clinical information arises. A standard language, validated internationally, allows information introduced not being an individual scale, but also a public and community health perspective.
 
The Portuguese Catalog of Allergies and Other Adverse Reactions (CPARA) has its first version in July 2012 (v1.0), and constitutes a first form of structured registration, in electronic support. The regulation of the Directorate-General of Health (DGS) – Norma nº 002/2012– recommended the registration of this information for all health professionals in the National Health Service institutions.
 
The catalog(CPARA) was updated for second version in December 2012, and this being the version currently implemented in the National Health Service (v2.0). Portuguese Ministry of Health Shared Services (SPMS), understood that it would be necessary to carry out a new update of the catalog in 2015, in order to follow the evolution in this field of knowledge and in a perspective of allowing the cross-border sharing of these data.
 
This project has the contributions from several stakeholders, and was for public consultation in April, 2015.
Within the scope of these project, a prospection have been carried out with the purpose to check the implementation in the different information systems and to attend to the different professionals involved.
 
Now it is available the 3rd version of the catalog (CPARA)for download, which objectives were:

–  review the existing content of the data, in order to include content that is not contemplated and that is relevant;

–  to use a standardization of the coded language used in the CPARA, in adoption of the international clinical terminology SNOMED CT.