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SNOMED CT Authoring, Maintenance & Migration Services
The Problem

A significant proportion of data in enterprises deals with administrative, workflow, metadata and other operational data. This data might not be appropriate for inclusion in the national/international edition of SNOMED CT. But enterprises might use this data for their day to day decisions or for longer term analysis.

Enterprise needs

Standardising such administrative and operational data allows enterprises to

  • Maintain it more easily in the longer run
  • Standardise their operational workflows
  • Analyse their clinical and associated operation information
  • Manage changes to their data and meta-data more predictably
Our Services

We can assist in the standardisation of such enterprise content using SNOMED CT

  • Migrating it to existing SNOMED CT content (where it exists) or creating new SNOMED CT conformant clinical content
  • Creating standardised administrative operational concepts based on terminology principles

Content Authoring, Maintenance & Publishing Overview

One of our core service offerings is that of standard terminology content creation and maintenance along with its mapping and migration. We have world class experts in clinical terminology/information standards and our team has worked with both the NHS Digital SNOMED CT team and externals in supporting content creation requests for SNOMED CT.

Content Creation
Our approach to content creation and migration is based on a combination of using terminology expertise and specialist terminology tooling.
Content Review
We have specialist tooling that allows your experts (e.g. clinicians) to review content to improve its quality before and after publication.
Content Release
We can assist in the formal publication of enterprise content in both SNOMED CT format (RF2) or in custom formats.
Distribution Process
Our specialist tools allow access to enterprise content via FHIR APIs, user friendly browsers and also for import into terminology servers

Content authoring

Our approach starts with an initial content analysis – separating ‘readily mappable` and nearly conformant content from the more challenging items. Our experts then identify/create templates/patterns for content based on our analysis. We use an agile iterative approach to progress content in batches based on patterns, existing mappings, etc. This agile and batch approach ensures that we prepare content for busy clinicians to review and address queries, while we continue to progress with batches that have already been reviewed. Our experts can help create and document additional editorial principles for specific contextual use cases (or patterns) for your extensions.

Tooling - Creation & Maintenance

Our authoring platform (Termnexus) enables agile iterative content creation based on patterns/templates to be done in parallel with collaborative review by experts (e.g. clinicians). It also allows content in different stages of development (and review) to be managed seamlessly. We can very rapidly turn around large volumes of high quality content using these tooling features and content analysis mentioned above. We can further embed some editorial principles and patterns in our tooling to support maintenance in the longer term. We used this approach to create ~1800 concepts for the Unified Test List (a new Pathology standard based on SNOMED CT) for NHS Digital.

Mapping/Migration

Often existing content and associated enterprise identifiers (codes) must be retained. Termnexus has mapping capabilities on top of basic content management functionality, which allow legacy/enterprise content to be migrated as mappings to newly created SNOMED CT content. This allows our clients to continue using the legacy/custom codes as part of their workflow while they plan their migration to native SNOMED CT. In our recent projects, we have supported the creation of SNOMED CT codes for legacy codes (based on Read `Y` codes) for HJIS (Health and Justice Information Services). We enable a similar approach to migration of legacy pathology (laboratory medicine) content to SNOMED CT.

Want on-going SNOMED CT content support?

We offer a `content maintenance` service as a support wrapper around tooling where we can fully manage a client’s content - aligning it with updates published in SNOMED CT.

Meet our Experts

Our authoring experts include Sarah Harry (Senior Terminology Specialist) and Malcolm Duncan (SNOMED CT expert and informatician).

Sarah is an internationally accredited SNOMED CT author and has long experience of authoring both SNOMED CT and Read codes. She used to lead the NHS Digital SNOMED CT terminology authoring team for many years and so has extensive experience of requirements analysis and engaging with external stakeholders.

Malcolm has extensive experience of addressing SNOMED CT related challenges and supports major suppliers (e.g. First Databank) with their SNOMED CT content updates. He is also an accredited SNOMED CT implementation advisor and was a member of the UK SNOMED CT Edition Committee.

We have additional senior authoring expertise available if the client needs work to be completed at very tight deadlines.

Content & Requirements Analysis
90%
SNOMED CT Accredited Authoring
90%
Editorial Principles & Templates
90%
Post coordination & ECL
90%
Clinical Background & Experience
90%
Data analysis requirements
90%
Refset/Subset & Implementation expertise
85%

Need Subset/Refset Creation?

Our SNOMED CT authoring and implementation skills help you to create and maintain your subsets/refsets!

SNOMED CT Implementation

Our team are aware of practical challenges and implementation issues in SNOMED CT enabled systems. We have worked directly with clinical users, technical teams, solution architects, decision makers and national programme leads in diverse roles.

Access content and features of SNOMED CT

We have extensive experience of using SNOMED CT in health care products. We have helped clients create SNOMED CT enabled products and we also use SNOMED CT in products we offer to the NHS. We can assist you in accessing content and specific features of SNOMED CT.

Use of Subsets to match clinical requirements

We have created subsets that are used within our own products and also helped design them for clients, including national programmes. We have a deep understanding of the needs of clinical users in using SNOMED CT for data entry (too many results, word order, relevance of results,etc) and how subsets can be leveraged to meet clinical requirements, while avoiding the challenges associated with refsets.

Support data entry, storage, retrieval

We have designed data entry screens that leverage SNOMED CT content using basic functionality like string matching to advanced features like Expression Constraint Language (ECL) queries for dynamically constraining data entry. We have also built end to end demonstrators that showcases how SNOMED CT coded healthcare records can be stored and retrieved – using both pre and post-coordinated data and queries.

Creating and maintaining SNOMED CT extension content

For enterprises and national programmes requiring their own SNOMED CT content (extension), we have expert knowledge and practical experience in helping.

  • Establish release and maintenance processes
  • Establish process for identifying delta content and upcoming changes in International Edition
    • Content of interest for translation, or of interest to refsets – including tools around it.
  • Establish quality assurance process (and metrics) around content

Development and deployment of cross maps

We have helped clients realise the benefits of SNOMED CT data analytics. We understand the rules around the complex maps published by NHS Digital and SNOMED International and can assist you in fulfilling your mandatory dataset and reporting requirements.

National & International Expertise

We have experience of supporting implementation activities in three national programmes – UK, Singapore and Sweden. Members in our team have also been elected to Advisory (Committee) roles in SNOMED International. We worked closely with NHS Digitial in the design and delivery of their strategy of national pathology standards, based on SNOMED CT.

Want to use SNOMED CT in your products?

Need to support SNOMED CT based interoperability in your products? We support the use of SNOMED CT terminology server APIs.