Forty years of SNOMED: a literature review

Abstract

Background: Over a period of 40 years, SNOMED has developed from a pathology-specific nomenclature (SNOP) into a logic-based health care terminology. In spite of its long existence and continuous evolvement, it is yet unknown to what extent SNOMED is used in clinical practice, and what benefits were achieved. The aim of this paper is to investigate this by providing an overview of published studies in which a version of SNOMED was studied or applied.Methods: This paper analyzes the use of SNOMED over time, as reflected in scientific publications, by means of Medline literature search in PubMed. The search included papers from 1966 until June 2006. For each selected paper the following characteristics were classified: version, medical domain, coding moment (during or after the care process), usage, and type of evaluation (e.g., does SNOMED work, does SNOMED help).Results: 250 papers were included in this research. The number of annual publications has increased, as has the number of domains in which SNOMED is being used. Theoretical studies mainly concern comparison of SNOMED to other terminological systems and SNOMED as an illustration of a terminological systems' theory. Few studies are available on the usage of SNOMED in clinical practice, largely involving coding information and retrieval/aggregation based on SNOMED codes. Conclusion:The clinical application of SNOMED is broadening beyond pathology. The majority of studies concern proving the value of SNOMED in theory. Fewer studies are available on the usage of SNOMED in clinical practice. Literature gives no indication of the use of SNOMED for direct care purposes such as decision support.

Model-theoretic inseparability and modularity of description logic ontologies

“…We perform a case study by extracting minimal depleting (equivalently: self-contained) Σ-modules from the medical ontology Snomed ct [11], using (a variation of) the algorithm in Figure 3. The purpose of the case study is twofold: first, we want to find out whether the extraction algorithm scales to very large real-world TBoxes with several hundred thousand concepts, and second we are interested in the typical size of the extracted modules.…”

“…Especially in the Life Sciences and other knowledge intensive domains, many such ontologies have been created. Important examples are the national cancer institute's thesaurus and ontology (NCI), the gene ontology (GO), and Snomed ct, the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine, Clinical Terms, which comprises about three hundred thousand vocabulary items and is used in the healthcare systems of more than twenty countries [9,10,11].…”

Informatización de la historia clínica en España

“…La International Health Terminology Standards Development Organization trabaja desde hace años en la elaboración de un lenguaje médico codificado y en un sistema capaz de reconocer y traducir los idiomas locales. Desde 2007 explota y administra los derechos de Snomed-CT, considerada la terminología médica multilingüe más amplia, que incluye más de 31.000 conceptos y 800.000 descripciones (Cornet;De-Keizer, 2008 La implantación de la HSE, las técnicas digitales empleadas en la grabación de numerosas pruebas diagnósticas, el uso de dispositivos móviles inalámbricos desde los que los profesionales médicos tienen acceso a los datos del paciente desde cualquier sitio del centro y la posibilidad de acceder a información online durante la consulta como soporte a sus decisiones, están mejorando la eficiencia de los profesionales y la calidad del servicio prestado a los pacientes.…”

ULisboa: Identification and Classification of Medical Concepts

“…Besides the recognition of medical concepts, we also present the strategy used to map each of the recognized concepts into a SNOMED CT identifier (Cornet and de Keizer, 2008). This task is particularly challenging, since there are many ambiguous cases.…”