Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine - Clinical Terms - SNOMED-CT
The Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine - Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT) is a reference terminology consisting of concepts, terms, and the interrelationships between them. It was designed for use in software applications to represent clinically relevant information in a reliable and reproducible manner. It currently has 370,000 pre-coordinated concepts. SNOMED-CT allows post-coordination, meaning that concepts can be developed by combinations of other concepts, as opposed to strictly pre-coordinated terminologies where all concepts are given express codes beforehand. Post-coordination is governed by a Description Logic. Despite the Description Logic, some primitive concepts can be expressed in terms of other concepts, and there are semantically duplicate concepts.
SNOMED-CT cross maps to multiple other terminologies, including ICD-9-CM, ICD-10, and LOINC. It supports ANSI, DICOM, HL7, XML and ISO standards. The US Government has accepted it as a standard for the National Health Information Infrastructure.
History:
The College of American Pathologists (CAP) developed the Standard Nomenclature of Pathology (SNOP) in 1965, basing it on the New York Academy of Medicine’s Standard Nomenclature of Diseases and Operations (SNDO). The Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED) was developed in 1974. This was expanded in 1979 into SNOMED II, followed by the Systematized Nomenclature of Human and Veterinary Medicine, SNOMED International, or SNOMED Version 3, in 1993. These versions were multi-axial. Coding was done by post-coordination of terms from multiple axes to represent complex terms.
SNOMED changed from a multi-axial terminology to a more logic-based structure in May 2000 with the release of SNOMED-RT, for Reference Terminology. The CAP, working with Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), merged SNOMED, with its strong support for terminology in specialty medicine, with Clinical Terms Version 3 (formerly READ codes), with its strong support for terminologies in general practice, to create SNOMED-CT, the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine - Clinical Terms. This was released in January 2002.
SNOMED-CT Spanish Edition was released in April 2002, and the German Edition was released in April 2003. The International Healthcare Terminology Standards Development Organization (IHTSDO) acquired SNOMED-CT in April 2007. The National Library of Medicine (NLM) is the US member of IHTSDO and distributes SNOMED-CT in the US.
References:
Edward H. Shortliffe and James J. Cimino, Biomedical Informatics: Computer Applications in Health Care and Bioinformatics, Third Edition (New York: Springer, 2006) 285-288.
SNOMED.org, “Historical Perspectives,” 01/26/2008, http://www.snomed.org/about/History_Summary.html.
SNOMED.org, “Requirements Document,” 06/03/2006, 01/26/2008, http://www.snomed.org/about/documents/SNOMEDCT_Objective_V05.pdf.
WikiPedia, “SNOMED CT,” 12/13/2007, 01/26/2008, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNOMED_CT.
--Charles Laudenbach 15:37, 26 January 2008 (CST)
