SNOMED CT

SNOMED CT stands for Systematised Nomenclature of Medicine - Clinical Terms and is a common, standardised clinical coding language.

SNOMED CT is the most comprehensive and precise clinical health terminology product in the world, it includes:

• Diagnosis and procedures
• Symptoms
• Family history
• Allergies
• Assessment tools
• Observations
• Devices
• Other content to support healthcare delivery

Vision Anywhere uses SNOMED Clinical Terms to record data, this results in:

• Consistent recording and retrieval of information.
• Advanced data analysis.
• Real-time decision support.
• Meaningful sharing of information.

SNOMED Clinical Terms are built of three building blocks:

• Concepts - These are unique codes.
• Relationships - These are the links between to other concepts.
• Descriptions - These are the fully specified names and the synonyms, it is these you select from for recording purposes.

  For example:

  

• The Tag displays after the Fully specified name (FSN) in brackets, this provides an indication of where in the SNOMED CT dictionary the Concept sits.
• A Preferred Term is designated to the description that most healthcare professionals use for a specific disorder, but you can select any synonym you require.

Within SNOMED CT, Concepts are associated with other concepts using two different types of relationships:

• The is-a relationship which enables concepts to be part of a structured hierarchy that group “like” concepts together. Each concept has a relationship to at least one “parent” concept and as you go down the hierarchy concepts become more detailed and specific.
• An attribute relationship can be used to further define each concept.

A Concept has is-a relationships, identifying what kind of concept it is, for example Clinical finding or procedure, and an attribute relationship which defines the particular concept, for example, for a procedure, it would include finding site, causative agent, laterality, method and many more.