Re-use of SNOMED CT subset in development of the Danish national standard for home care nursing problems

SNOMED CT was chosen as reference terminology for standardisation of homecare nursing documentation to make reporting comparable across the 98 Danish municipalities. The method outlined in this paper for developing a Danish national homecare nursing SNOMED CT subsets is a pragmatic approach to build new SNOMED CT subsets drawing on existing and available SNOMED CT subsets. Combining this approach with awareness of hierarchical coherency in SNOMED CT subsets makes effective retrieval of data possible.