Medicine is a universal human endeavor, yet the language we use to describe clinical interventions is locked behind proprietary licensing walls. Current Procedural Terminology (CPT), owned by the American Medical Association (AMA), generates hundreds of millions of dollars in licensing fees, turning clinical vocabulary into a toll road. No one can own the language of medicine. Doctors, patients, and software systems must be free to communicate clinical interventions without financial gates.
OMNI (Open Medical Nomenclature and Interventions) is designed as a public, royalty-free, and openly licensed alternative. By providing a clean, descriptive, and freely accessible repository of clinical interventions, OMNI enables healthcare systems, innovators, and clinical registries worldwide to exchange data without friction. The OMNI standard is released entirely under open licenses: the software is MIT, and the coding structure is CC BY 4.0.
Technically, OMNI builds on the World Health Organization's ICHI (International Classification of Health Interventions) taxonomy. It operates on a clean, expressive three-axis composition: Target (what organ or tissue is being operated on), Action (what surgical or diagnostic action is performed), and Means (the method, approach, or imaging modality used). Stem codes map precisely to ICHI and SNOMED CT compositional grammar, making OMNI both fully convertible and backward-compatible with legacy codes.
We offer OMNI to the global medical community as a collaborative proposal. As healthcare transitions to digital orchestration and open interoperability, clinical standards must be public infrastructure, not private assets. OMNI is here to serve as that foundational public utility, paving the way for a more open, equitable, and intelligent medical record ecosystem.