SNOMED is one of the leading health care terminologies being used worldwide. As such, quality assurance is an important part of its maintenance cycle. Methodologies for auditing SNOMED based on structural aspects of its organization are presented. In particular, automated techniques for partitioning SNOMED into smaller groups of concepts based primarily on relationships patterns are defined. Tw...

Introduction Within the UK, previous syndromic surveillance studies have used statistical estimation to describe the activity of respiratory pathogens.1 The Emergency Department Syndromic Surveillance System (EDSSS) was initially developed in preparation of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games and has continued as a standard surveillance system, with expanding coverage across England an...

The National Electronic Disease Surveillance System (NEDSS) relies on industry-standard code sets used in health information technology (i.e., LOINC, SNOMED, and HL7) to integrate surveillance systems that efficiently and securely transfer public health, laboratory, and clinical data from the health care system to public health departments. NEDSS comprises interoperable individual surveillance ...

A method is presented that enables automatic classification of medical diagnoses through their reports in natural language. The method is based on the nearest neighbor rule: classification of a new case by assigning to it the same codes as the most similar case in the archive. A simulation experiment showed that in 84% of the trials a suitable classification was contained within the first five ...

Collaborative development involving both individuals and groups is often less efficient than independent development because of communication overhead and integration costs. Despite the decreased development efficiency, collaborations promise more general-purpose products because of the opportunity for integration, with negotiation and reconciliation of diverse perspectives. Collaborations are ...

As part of its investigations, the EU-funded ASSESS CT project developed an Economic Assessment Model for assessing SNOMED CT's and other terminologies' socio-economic impact in a systematic approach. Methodology and key elements of the model are presented: cost and benefit indicators for assessing deployment, and a cost-benefit analysis tool to collect, estimate, and evaluate data.

OBJECTIVE To quantify the presence of and evaluate an approach for detection of inconsistencies in the formal definitions of SNOMED CT (SCT) concepts utilizing a lexical method. MATERIAL AND METHOD Utilizing SCT's Procedure hierarchy, we algorithmically formulated similarity sets: groups of concepts with similar lexical structure of their fully specified name. We formulated five random sample...

This paper discusses the manner in which SNOMED CT (SCT) has confused the metonymic role of some class labels as holonyms and has inappropriately assigned property inheritance down a holonymic chain due to its transitiveness. The notion of emergent properties is introduced as the only form of property that can exist on a holonym and its use in a hypernymic inheritance hierarchy is discussed. Th...

BACKGROUND SNOMED RT represents a fundamental change from prior versions of SNOMED. The logic-based structure of SNOMED RT enables concepts to be defined more explicitly, providing an opportunity to address inconsistencies and ambiguities present in prior SNOMED concept definitions. OBJECTIVES Create a unifying organizational strategy for all SNOMED RT procedures, and remove ambiguities in pr...

An important feature of SNOMED CT is post-coordination, which is enabled as SNOMED CT specifies refinability of target concepts of relationships. In this paper the use of refinable relationships in SNOMED CT is analysed, and the interplay between refinable and defining relationships. Refinability is used in 10 out of 61 relationships, and the interplay between refinable and defining relationshi...