Central technical work

NUVA: Unified Nomenclature of Vaccines

An open, shared ontology for representing administered vaccines and their valences consistently across existing vaccine code systems and over time.

Why NUVA is needed

Vaccine and medicinal-product codes are created for different purposes and jurisdictions and may change over time. A person's vaccination history must remain interpretable long after a particular product or code has changed.

NUVA helps people interpret and relate existing codifications across jurisdictions and over long periods.

Core concepts

A common way to describe vaccine meaning

Vaccine concept: A NUVA concept representing the recorded identification of an administered vaccine, whatever its original form.
Abstract vaccine: A class of products with the same valences rather than a specific manufactured product.
Real vaccine: A specific vaccine product that has been made available for administration.
Valence: The smallest functional unit useful for assessing vaccination status and explaining a vaccine's mechanism, composition, or technological classification.
Alignment: A documented relationship between a code in an existing code system and a NUVA concept.

Core and alignment layers

NUVA vaccine concepts are described functionally by their valences. Alignment layers can associate codes from existing systems with those concepts without making external codes part of the NUVA core.

A focused purpose

NUVA focuses on recording administered vaccines. It is not intended to cover every purpose served by broader medicinal-product systems. Functions such as adverse-event reporting and other general medicinal-product information remain the responsibility of appropriate systems.

NUVA and IVC

NUVA is central to IVC's technical work. IVC provides a place for collaboration and helps develop supporting tools, processes, and extension layers. IVC members can contribute to extension layers, but IVC does not currently authorize changes to the NUVA core.

Continue the discussion

NUVA and related alignment work are frequent subjects of IVC meetings.

Attend an IVC meeting