Quality assurance and audit issues play a major role in maintening large biomedical terminology, such as SNOMED CT. Several automatized techniques have been proposed to facilitate the identification of weak spots and suggest adequate improvements.In this study, we address a well-known issue within SNOMED CT: Albeit the wording of many free-text concept descriptions suggests a connection to othe...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the usability of a large compositional interface terminology based on SNOMED CT and the terminology application for registration of the reasons for intensive care admission in a Patient Data Management System. DESIGN Observational study with user-based usability evaluations before and 3 months after the system was implemented and routinely used. MEASUREMENTS Usability ...

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 ...

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...

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...

A SNOMED CT-encoded problem list will be required to satisfy the Certification Criteria for Stage 2 "Meaningful Use" of the EHR incentive program. ICD-10-CM will be replacing ICD-9-CM as the reimbursement code set in the near future. Having a cross-map from SNOMED CT to ICD-10-CM will promote the use of SNOMED CT as the primary problem list terminology, while easing the transition to ICD-10-CM....

The APACHE IV classification is used to capture diagnostic information for calculation of mortality risks in intensive care (IC). The lack of structured and formal definitions for concepts in APACHE IV classification as in any classification results in shortcomings when scaling up for re-use. The use of SNOMED CT as a reference terminology can address these shortcomings. However, all of SNOMED ...

SNOMED CT is a vital component in the future of semantic interoperability in healthcare as it provides the meaning to EHRs via its semantically rich, controlled terminology. Communicating the concepts of this terminology to both humans and machines is crucial therefore formal guidelines for diagram and expression representations have been developed by the curators of SNOMED CT. This paper prese...