SNOMED CT: working smarter, not harder

[摘要] The challenges faced by general practice today are enormous. We are contending with the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, significant staff shortages, and an ageing and increasingly complex patient population. We need to become more efficient while improving care quality and safety. How can we do this? SNOMED CT (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine — Clinical Terms) holds some of the answers, but many practices are unaware of its full potential.WHAT IS SNOMED CT? SNOMED CT is the world’s most comprehensive clinical terminology and is mandated for use in the UK. It supports the standardised recording and encoding of patient information, including diagnoses, procedures, and medications. The terminology is designed to be usable in any electronic health record system. You may recognise codes and terms like this: ‘195967001 |Asthma (disorder)|’. These are called concepts in SNOMED CT. Every concept represents a clinical entity with a unique code and a series of descriptions indicative of its meaning. SNOMED CT is more than just a list of codes and descriptions; it is a computer-processable ontology. Every concept has a computer-understandable meaning called a logical definition. By using these definitions, thousands of different concepts can be linked together through parent–child relationships and other defining characteristics. As computers can understand and process these definitions, we can unleash their processing power to support our clinical and operational decision making.

[学科分类] 卫生学