Representation of disorders of the newborn infant by SNOMED CT®

SNOMED CT is the most sophisticated reference terminology currently available for the representation of healthcare. An unforeseen consequence of the opportunistic evolutionary process for SNOMED CT may be that some terms for disorders of specialised clinical domains are not represented within the terminology. The SNOMED CT July 2006 release was systematically examined using the CliniClue terminology browser to determine whether 434 terms for disorders of the newborn infant are represented within the terminology. There was complete representation for 90.8% of the terms for disorders of the newborn infant, partial representation for 6.4% of the terms, and no representation for 2.8% of the terms. Complete representation is achieved with a single, pre-coordinated SNOMED expression for 96.2% of the terms for disorders of the newborn infant that have complete representation within SNOMED CT. Nearly ninety percent of the SNOMED CT concepts that completely represent these terms have the current Concept Status but less than 40% of these concepts are fully defined SNOMED concepts. Nearly 50% of these SNOMED CT concepts have one or more synonyms. SNOMED CT provides structured representation for the majority of this set of terms that are used for disorders of the newborn infant.