3.1. Motivation for Implementation

SNOMED Clinical Terms ( SNOMED CT) is widely recognized as the leading global clinical terminology for use in electronic health records. It is maintained and developed by an International body (the IHTSDO) which has a growing community of Members and Affiliates. It is available free for use in IHTSDO Member countries and can also be used in other countries based on openly published licensing terms that are designed to be affordable. IHTSDO policies allow for the open involvement of its Members and Affiliate Licensees in the development of content and the design of future enhancements.

The features of SNOMED CT include:

A broad scope that covers most of the clinical concepts used in patient centered clinical records;
Ability to express different levels of clinical detail in patient record entries by using expressions containing one or more concept Identifiers;
Relationships between concepts that enable consistent retrieval of a common form of clinical information for many different purposes;
Extensible design allowing graceful, evolutionary enhancement and addition of national, local or specialty content within a coherent standard structure;
A reference set mechanism to support representation of language / dialect variants, value-sets, alternative hierarchies and mapping to classifications;
Component permanence with history tracking;
Good compliance with the essential features for future clinical terminologies as identified by JJ Cimino in his peer acclaimed 1998 paper.

SNOMED CT is designed to enable effective representation of clinical information in electronic health records. While there are other potential uses for SNOMED CT, the potential benefits are greatest where it is implemented as a part of a Clinical Information System centered on the delivery of health care services to individuals and populations.

The benefits actually realized by implementation depend on the technical design of applications and the way they integrate SNOMED CT with other essential elements. These technical issues are addressed in this guide. Another critical success factor is a process for managing implementation across an organization, region or country. Although the guide does not address broader issues of operational implementation within an organisation, it does provide a key source of reference for those specifying the practical details of a plan for large scale implementation of SNOMED CT.