Welcome! Today we'll explore SNOMED CT, which stands for Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms. SNOMED CT is a comprehensive, multilingual clinical healthcare terminology system used worldwide to represent medical information consistently and reliably in electronic health records.
SNOMED CT is built on three core components that work together. First, concepts represent clinical ideas or meanings, like diseases or procedures. Second, descriptions provide human-readable terms for these concepts. Third, relationships link concepts together, forming a structured hierarchy that enables precise medical coding and information retrieval.
SNOMED CT has widespread applications across healthcare systems. It's used in electronic health records, clinical decision support systems, medical research, and health information exchange. By providing a standardized terminology, SNOMED CT enables consistent data sharing between hospitals, clinics, and research institutions, improving patient care coordination and medical research capabilities.
Let's look at a concrete example: myocardial infarction. In SNOMED CT, this has concept ID 22298006 with the preferred term "Myocardial infarction". It includes synonyms like "Heart attack" and "MI". The system also defines relationships, showing it's a type of acute myocardial ischemia, affects myocardial structure, and involves infarction as the pathological process. This structured approach enables precise medical coding.
SNOMED CT delivers significant benefits to healthcare worldwide. It improves patient safety through better clinical decision making, enhances data quality and consistency, facilitates medical research, and reduces healthcare costs. With global interoperability as a key feature, SNOMED CT is now used in over 80 countries, supporting better healthcare outcomes and enabling seamless information exchange across international healthcare systems.