Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT) Controlled Vocabulary

A Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT) Controlled Vocabulary is a clinical terminology standard (of medical term).

• Context:
  • It can (often) be used for listing and linking Medical Terms used in human and veterinary medicine.
  • It can be owned and maintained by SNOMED International.
  • It can have SNOMED Documentation such as: https://confluence.ihtsdotools.org/display/DOCSTART
  • It can be a superset of SNOMED-RT (Refined Terminology) (a subset designed to provide a more detailed and specific coding system).
  • ...
• Example(s:)
  • SNODENT,
  • SNOMED CT Australian Edition,
  • SNOMED CT Spanish Edition,
  • ...
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • AMA Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) Code Set,
  • CDISC Controlled-Terminology Standard,
  • Clinical Care Classification System,
  • Foundational Model of Anatomy,
  • ...
• See: Medical Terms, Veterinary Medicine, Anatomy, Diseases, Microorganisms, Standard-Developing Organization (SDO), American National Standards Institute (ANSI), International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Clinical Trial Data, Health Level Seven (HL7) Standard, OpenEHR, Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC) Standard, IHTSDO, Electronic Health Record, Controlled Vocabulary.

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References

2023

• chat
  • Q: What is SNOMED? What is the difference between SNOWMED-RT and SNOWMED-CT?
  • A: SNOMED (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine) is an international standardized medical terminology system used for the coding and classification of clinical information. It is the most comprehensive and widely used clinical terminology system in the world. SNOMED was developed by the College of American Pathologists (CAP) and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI).

     SNOMED-RT (Refined Terminology) is a subset of SNOMED-CT (Clinical Terms) designed to provide a more detailed and specific coding system. SNOMED-RT contains more detailed descriptions of diseases, treatments, and other medical conditions. It also allows for more specific and accurate coding of medical information. SNOMED-CT is a more general coding system and is used mostly for diagnosis or billing purposes.

2022a

• (SNOMED, 2022) ⇒ https://www.snomed.org/snomed-ct/why-snomed-ct Retrieved:2022-02-27.
  • QUOTE: In 2020, SNOMED International released its 2020-2025 Strategy and identified the need to revisit the value proposition for key stakeholder groups as well as illustrating the case for investment in SNOMED CT for Nations, health systems, vendors, etc., globally. The product of this analysis is shared here.

2022b

• (HIMSS, 2022) ⇒ https://www.himss.org/resources/interoperability-healthcare#Part2 Retrieved:2022-02-27.
  • QUOTE: Vocabulary/terminology standards address the ability to represent concepts in an unambiguous manner between a sender and receiver of information, a fundamental requirement for effective communication. Health information systems that communicate with each other rely on structured vocabularies, terminologies, code sets and classification systems to represent health concepts. Some common vocabulary standards currently used in the marketplace include:
    • Current Procedural Terminology (CPT): A code set, maintained by the American Medical Association (AMA), used to bill outpatient and office procedures.
    • Healthcare Common Procedure Coding System: A set of healthcare procedure codes based on CPT that is used for Medicare reimbursement.
    • (...)
    • Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT): A comprehensive clinical health terminology product. It enables the consistent, processable representation of clinical content in electronic health records (EHRs). These codes often represent the “answer” for a test or measurement to the LOINC “question” code.
    • The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provide a number of code sets for vaccines (Vaccines Administered (CVX)) and manufacturers (Manufacturers of Vaccines (MVX)). These codes can be used in immunization messages.
    • The Unified Code for Units of Measure: A code system intended to include all units of measures used in international science, engineering and business to facilitate unambiguous electronic communication of quantities together with their units.

2022c

• (LOINC) ⇒ https://loinc.org/kb/faq/loinc-and-other-standards/ Retrieved:2022-02-27.
  • QUOTE: SNOMED is a large, comprehensive computerized clinical terminology covering clinical data for diseases, clinical findings, and procedures. In HL7 ORU messages, LOINC provides codes for the question (OBR-4, OBX-3) while SNOMED provides codes for the answers (OBX-5).

2022d

• (NIH, 2022) ⇒ https://www.nlm.nih.gov/healthit/snomedct/index.html Retrived:2022-2-27.
  • QUOTE: SNOMED CT is one of a suite of designated standards for use in U.S. Federal Government systems for the electronic exchange of clinical health information and is also a required standard in interoperability specifications of the U.S. Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel. The clinical terminology is owned and maintained by SNOMED International, a not-for-profit association.

    As the United States National Release Center for SNOMED CT, NLM provides SNOMED CT data and resources to licensees of the NLM UMLS Metathesaurus(...)

2021

• (Gaudet-Blavignac et al., 2021) ⇒ Christophe Gaudet-Blavignac, Vasiliki Foufi, and Mina Bjelogrlic, Christian Lovis (2021). "Use of the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) for Processing Free Text in Health Care: Systematic Scoping Review". In: Journal of medical Internet research, 23(1), e24594. DOI:10.2196/24594.
  • QUOTE: The Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) was created in 1999 by the fusion of 2 important health care terminologies—SNOMED reference terminology (SNOMED RT) and Clinical Terms Version 3. It was first released in 2002. SNOMED CT is currently considered as the most comprehensive, multilingual, clinical health care terminology in the world, with more than 350,000 concepts and a million relationships . It is maintained and published by SNOMED International, a nonprofit organization comprising 39 member countries. In the last 18 years, SNOMED CT has grown in size and coverage and has been included as a standard vocabulary in the meaningful use program . This is an important step for any electronic health record willing to attain interoperability.

2016

• (Wikipedia, 2016) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNOMED_CT Retrieved:2016-1-9.
  • SNOMED CT or SNOMED Clinical Terms is a systematically organized computer processable collection of medical terms providing codes, terms, synonyms and definitions used in clinical documentation and reporting. SNOMED CT is considered to be the most comprehensive, multilingual clinical healthcare terminology in the world. The primary purpose of SNOMED CT is to encode the meanings that are used in health information and to support the effective clinical recording of data with the aim of improving patient care. SNOMED CT provides the core general terminology for electronic health records. SNOMED CT comprehensive coverage includes: clinical findings, symptoms, diagnoses, procedures, body structures, organisms and other etiologies, substances, pharmaceuticals, devices and specimens. SNOMED CT is maintained and distributed by the IHTSDO, an international non-profit standards development organization, located in Copenhagen, Denmark. SNOMED CT provides for consistent information interchange and is fundamental to an interoperable electronic health record. It provides a consistent means to index, store, retrieve, and aggregate clinical data across specialties and sites of care. It also helps in organizing the content of electronic health records systems by reducing the variability in the way data are captured, encoded and used for clinical care of patients and research. SNOMED CT can be used to directly record clinical details of individuals in electronic patient records. It also provides the user with a number of linkages to clinical care pathways, shared care plans and other knowledge resources, in order to facilitate informed decision-making, and to support long-term patient care. The availability of free automatic coding tools and services, which can return a ranked list of SNOMED CT descriptors to encode any clinical report, could help healthcare professionals to navigate the terminology. SNOMED CT is a terminology that can cross-map to other international standards and classifications. Specific language editions are available which augment the international edition and can contain language translations, as well as additional national terms. For example, SNOMED CT-AU, released in December 2009 in Australia, is based on the international version of SNOMED CT, but encompasses words and ideas that are clinically and technically unique to Australia.

2004

• (Goldberg et al., 2004) ⇒ Louis J. Goldberg, Werner Ceusters, John Eisner, and Barry Smith (2004). "The Significance of SNODENT". In: Medical Informatics Europe (Vol. 2005).
  • QUOTE: SNODENT is a dental diagnostic vocabulary incompletely integrated in SNOMED-CT(...)

    As a means of providing free access to a reputable clinical coding system, the US Department of Health and Human Services purchased rights to SNOMED Clinical Terms (hereafter: SNOMED-CT) from the College of American Pathologists in the summer of 2003. The first release of SNOMED-CT includesd 375,000+ concepts, 957,000+ descriptions or synonyms and 1,370,000+ relationships. Embedded in this January 2004 release was a 6,000+ term dental diagnostic vocabulary, known within the dental community as SNODENT. It was designed as a diagnostic companion to the Current Dental Terminology (CDT) treatment codes of the American Dental Association. Of these 6000+ terms approximately 1600 were contributed by the American Dental Association while the remainder were dental terms already contained within SNOMED.

2003

• (Batet et al., 2013) ⇒ Montserrat Batet, David Sánchez, Aida Valls, and Karina Gibert. (2013). “Semantic Similarity Estimation from Multiple Ontologies.” In: Applied Intelligence Journal, 38(1). doi:10.1007/s10489-012-0355-y
  • QUOTE: We evaluate and compare our method using several general purpose and biomedical benchmarks of word pairs whose similarity has been assessed by human experts, and several general purpose (WordNet) and biomedical ontologies (SNOMED CT and MeSH).

2001

• (Stearns et al., 2001) ⇒ Michael Q. Stearns, Colin Price, Kent A. Spackman, and Amy Y. Wang. (2001). “SNOMED Clinical Terms: Overview of the Development Process and Project Status.” In: Proceedings of the AMIA Symposium, p.662 . American Medical Informatics Association.
  • ABSTRACT: Two large health care reference terminologies, SNOMED RT and Clinical Terms Version 3 , are in the process of being merged to form a comprehensive new work referred to as SNOMED Clinical Terms. The College of American Pathologists and the United Kingdom s National Health Service have entered into a collaborative agreement to develop this new work. Both organizations have extensive terminology development and maintenance experience. This paper discusses the process and status of SNOMED CT development and how the resources and expertise of both organizations are being used to develop this new terminological resource. The preliminary results of the merger process, including mapping, the merger of upper levels of each hierarchy, and attribute harmonization are also discussed.

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