  Routinely collected data in electronic healthcare records are often
underpinned by clinical concept dictionaries. Increasingly data sets from these
sources are being made available and used for research purposes, but without
additional tooling it can be difficult to work effectively with these
dictionaries due to their design, size and complex nature. In an effort to
improve this situation the clinconcept package was created to provide a
straightforward way for researchers to build, manage and interrogate databases
containing commmonly used clinical concept dictionaries. This article describes
the rationale behind the package, how to install it and use it and how it can
be extended to support other data sources.
