The parallel use of different versions of classifications and terminologies complicates the comparability of coded patient data. Annual adaptations of classifications like ICD-10 can be dealt with by using simple conversion tables. Terminologies like SNOMED CT have a much more complicate structure and biannual versions in different languages are offered in at least four representation formats. ...

Adoption of SNOMED CT has not been as quick and easy as many people had hoped or expected. One reason is lack of education and hence understanding of what SNOMED CT does and how it works. We set out to answer the question "who needs to know what?" about SNOMED CT to help establish priorities for UK higher education. We devised an online questionnaire and obtained 177 responses, 51% health IT pr...

The Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare has been overseeing translations of the international clinical terminology SNOMED CT from English to Swedish. This study was performed to find whether semi-automatic methods of translation could produce a satisfactory translation while requiring fewer resources than manual translation. Using the medical English-Swedish dictionary TermColl transla...

We evaluated the utility of the CEN Categorical Structure for Nursing Diagnoses as a terminology model for integrating nursing diagnosis concepts into SNOMED. First, we dissected nursing diagnosis term phrases from two source terminologies (North American Nursing Diagnosis Association (NANDA) Taxonomy 1 and Omaha System) into the semantic categories of the CEN categorical structure. Second, we ...

The aim of this paper is to apply and develop methods based on Natural Language Processing for automatically testing the validity, reliability and coverage of various Swedish SNOMED-CT subsets, the Systematized NOmenclature of MEDicine Clinical Terms a multiaxial, hierarchical classification system which is currently being translated from English to Swedish. Our work has been developed across t...

BACKGROUND Definitory expressions about clinical procedures, findings and diseases constitute a major benefit of a formally founded clinical reference terminology which is ontologically sound and suited for formal reasoning. SNOMED CT claims to support formal reasoning by description-logic based concept definitions. METHODS On the basis of formal ontology criteria we analyze complex SNOMED CT...

Introduction Monitoring laboratory test reports could aid disease surveillance by adding diagnostic specificity to early warning signals and thus improving the efficiency of public health investigation of detected signals. Laboratory data could also be employed to direct and evaluate interventions and countermeasures, while monitoring outbreak trends and progress; this would ultimately result i...

OBJECTIVE We introduce a structural-lexical approach for auditing SNOMED CT using a combination of non-lattice subgraphs of the underlying hierarchical relations and enriched lexical attributes of fully specified concept names. Our goal is to develop a scalable and effective approach that automatically identifies missing hierarchical IS-A relations. METHODS Our approach involves 3 stages. In ...

OBJECTIVES We evaluated the usefulness of two models for integrating nursing diagnosis concepts into SNOMED Clinical Terms (CT). METHODS First, we dissected nursing diagnosis term phrases from two source terminologies (North American Nursing Diagnosis Association Taxonomy 1 (NANDA) and Omaha System) into the semantic categories of the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) categorical s...

Access to reliable data from electronic health records is of high importance in several key areas in patient care, biomedical research, and education. However, many of the clinical entities are negated in the patient record text. Detecting what is a negation and what is not is therefore a key to high quality text mining. In this study we used the NegEx system adapted for Swedish to investigate ...