Many people today acknowledge that ontologies may help building better and more interoperable information systems, also in medicine. On the other hand, many others are skeptical about the real impact that ontologies - apart from the academic world - may have on the design and maintenance of working information systems. In order to ensure semantic consistency to the heterogeneous information systems that may be applied to the health-care domain, we defined a Reference Ontology in MEdicine (ROME). It consists of about 200 general entities and it is designed to act as a bridge between more specific systems.