SNOMED Annual Report 2018

The ability to share accurate and comprehensive health information is increasingly important in our digital age.  Safe, reliable healthcare depends on access to, and the use of, information that is accurate, valid, timely, relevant, and complete.

SNOMED plays a key role in this area.  It's a resource that facilitates direct patient care, clinical decision support, collaboration among health professionas, and data analytics.

You can read the SNOMED 2018 Annual Report here SNOMED Annual Report 2018

What is SNOMED CT?

SNOMED CT is a terminological resource that can be implemented in software applications to represent clinically relevant information reliably and reproducibly, thereby providing a standardised way to represent clinical information, improving our ability to code, retrieve, and analyse clincial data.

SNOMED CT the most comprehensive clincial terminology available internationally.  It is organised in 19 hierarchies such as diseases, symptoms, procedures.  It consists of concepts, descriptions and relationships.  The most recent release contained 466,612 concepts, 1,451,467 descriptions and 1,024,719 relationships.  As such, it aims to define all of the concepts within medicine.

Governance Group

In September 2017, the governance group for SNOMED was set up and the Terms of Reference were written, in colloboration between the Health Information and Quality Authority and the Office of the Chief Information Officer within the Health Service Executive.  The governance group comprises a number of key stakeholders including, representatives from the Health Information and Quality Authority, the Department of Health, the Health Service Executive, the Health Research Board, National Standards Authority of Ireland, academia, the Council of Clinical Information Officers, teh Clinical Care Programmes and a Patient Representative.

Foundations in place

A work plan was developed and the group focused on engaging stakeholders, developing their processes and procuring services to support the implementation of the processes.  

Their effors in 2018 was about getting the foundations in place to support the adoption and successful roll out of SNOMED CT in clinical informatin systems in Ireland.  This resulted in them being in a position to test their release process with a beta Irish edition being released in 2018.