Summary of CVC Working Group Meeting - COVID Terminology

Thank you to everyone who participated in the CVC Working Group Meeting yesterday on developing COVID-19 vaccine terminology. Please find below a summary of action items and next steps.

COVID-19 Trade Name Concepts
- Linda Parisien (Canada Health Infoway) and Dr. Robert Pless (Health Canada) will work together to fill in existing RFCs for trade name concepts for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and will aim to have these completed by next week.
- P/Ts reached consensus that acquiring codes for COVID-19 vaccine trade name products is the most urgent priority in the interim.
- P/Ts indicated that changing the trade name/fully specified name when more product information becomes available is acceptable as long as codes are available and remain the same.

COVID-19 Generic Concepts
- These high-level generic concepts will be included in the next CVC release:
28531000087107 |Vaccine product against disease caused by Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (medicinal product)|
1119349007 |Vaccine product containing only Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 messenger ribonucleic acid (medicinal product)|
- Further discussion is needed on whether to include the below concept:
1119305005 |Vaccine product containing only Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 antigen (medicinal product)|

COVID-19 Abbreviations
- The generic agent abbreviation listed on the NACI website is COVID-19 and will be used in the interim. This will not be confirmed until the vaccine is approved.
- Further discussion is required on what values should be used for generic abbreviations and whether these values must uniquely identify the trade name product. The CVC team’s opinion is that this should not be a requirement as this has not been what was done for other vaccines, and that the CVC clinician picklist term or preferred term should be used when implementing a vaccine picklist for the administered vaccine use case. We do not have visibility into Panorama however and understand that the requirement might be driven by how Panorama’s picklists are implemented. We will continue this discussion in our next meeting.

Dissemination of Codes
- As soon as we receive codes from Canada Health Infoway, the CANImmunize team will send out this information to P/Ts in the group via email, linking them to the RFCs in Informs.
- This will also be posted in the Public Health Surveillance community forum.