SNOMED CT and its Place in Health Information Management Practice.

The Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terminology (SNOMED CT®) has been endorsed as an international standard reference terminology to facilitate e-health initiatives. SNOMED CT is developed and supported in an international collaborative effort through the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organization (IHTSDO) and the member countries (approximately15) function as partnered National Release Centres1. Australia, through our National E-Health Transition Authority (NEHTA) is a charter member, joining this international community early and dedicating resources to development and adoption strategies.2 There is an eagerness to drive the uptake of SNOMED CT in order to facilitate electronic health records (EHRs) and exchange of health information, to ensure patient safety and quality care delivery, to provide decision support functionality and to achieve health system efficiencies through interoperability. SNOMED CT and ICD-10-AM/ACHI are very different; they have different purposes, and are intended for different system deployments and for different users: SNOMED CT is a clinical terminology. It describes and defines clinical entities such as diseases, procedures, substances, organisms. It is designed to facilitate clinician recording of clinical information in an electronic health record. Essentially, it facilitates input. ICD-10-AM and ACHI are statistical classifications. They also describe clinical entities but in a much more aggregated way. They are designed for statistical analysis – the output. Because SNOMED CT and ICD-10-AM/ACHI are used for different purposes and at different stages of information collection, they are both necessary and are complementary. Below are two examples showing how SNOMED CT and ICD-10-AM/ACHI represent the same ‘thing’ differently.