Beijing University of Chinese Medicine has partnered with Elsevier and will work with the clinical decision support company to create a new taxonomy for traditional Chinese medicine in Elsevier's biomedical and pharmacological literature database, Embase.

More and more Western patients are embracing Eastern medical techniques, of course, and Elsevier said its new focus on ancient Chinese health practices will help enhance its content and CDS offerings, building upon existing research and evidence bases.

BUCM will review terms and help build a detailed taxonomy to encompass TCM data in Embase, enhancing Elsevier's existing content and making it easily discoverable to clinical users looking to draw upon different practices.

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Pharma companies are increasingly interested in TCM – a global market worth more than $124 billion dollars worldwide, the company points out. But despite practices dating back millennia, research into traditional practices pose hurdles in the modern age, officials said.

Much of the inherited knowledge has been digitized into discrete data, but indexing, searching and retrieving specific pieces of evidence can be challenging. Add to this the complexity of atypical spellings, synonyms, translations, and symbols – often with many ways to refer to the same treatment – and the challenges are even more acute, according to Elsevier.

By working with BUCM, the company will be able to sort through and structure the various branches of TCM, allowing for providers to search for specific traditional medicines and find linked results.

“The trend in the use of traditional and complementary medicine is growing globally, and as a result, the volume of published resources into this field is increasing at a rate of around 6 percent per year, with more than 10,000 scholarly research or review articles published in 2017 alone,” said Cameron Ross, managing director of life science solutions at Elsevier, in a statement. “By enabling this discovery and analysis of integrated health and medical research, we can provide our customers with more successful outcomes and a deeper understanding of the evidence behind how TCM complements conventional medicine to improve prospects for patients.”

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