A Literature Review of 40 Years of SNOMED

Cornet and de Keizer have written an article on SNOMED ‘40 years of SNOMED: A literature review‘ under a Creative Commons 2.0 license. The article was written in 2008 and SNOP (the SNOMED-RT and SNOMED-CT precursor) was created in 1965 so they are referencing just over 40 years of literature.

This a nice article to gain an overview of the field.  After excluding irrelevant papers

‘The remaining 250 Medline indexed papers on SNOMED have been published in 80 different journals‘.

and

‘The first paper on SNOP having an abstract in PubMed was published in 1975‘

and

‘SNOMED was the main object of study in 163 papers‘.

The results however are slightly disappointing.

‘Fewer studies are available on the usage of SNOMED in clinical practice. The use of SNOMED as described in these papers largely involves coding information and retrieval/aggregation based on SNOMED codes‘

and putting this into context

‘Literature gives no indication of the use of SNOMED for direct care purposes such as decision support. As decision support relies on formal representation, which was introduced in SNOMED RT, studies investigating this aspect can now be performed‘

So in summary, the authors have reviewed the literature and identified a reasonably large number of papers. On closer examination, many of these papers do not answer questions about how SNOMED versions are used in practice nor do they focus on how the SNOMED architecture can be used to support clinicians in decision making.

The authors clearly identify a way forwards.

Appendix A – Other Posts in the Series on Health Information Exchanges

Arizona Statewide Health Information Exchange

A History of The Health Information Exchange in Pennsylvania

The Arkansas Health Information Exchange – SHARE

The California Health Information Exchange – Cal Index

Creating a Health Information Exchange in Arizona

Health Information Exchanges

Health Information Exchanges and Chronic Conditions

HIPPA and Health Information Exchanges

ICD-11 and SNOMED CT®

ICD-SNOMED-CT® Harmonisation

Körner Data and SNOMED: A Snapshot from 1988

Mapping ICD 9 (or 10) to SNOMED CT®

Over 1 Million Relationships: SNOMED CT ®

Standardisation of Health Information Technology in New Zealand

Why Do We Need Electronic Record Systems to Talk to Each Other

Appendix B – Definition of Health Information Exchange

This is the definition of the Health Information Exchange that I use (Hersh et al, 2015)

‘Health information exchange (HIE), the electronic sharing of clinical information across the boundaries of health care organizations‘

Index: There are indices for the TAWOP site here and here

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