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Standards
Broader development of SNOMED is
announced
 COPENHAGEN, Denmark
– The International Health Terminology Standards Development
Organisation (IHTSDO) has announced a global effort to improve access to
tools needed to develop, maintain, and enable the use of SNOMED CT in
health systems around the world.
This effort is part of an Open Health Tools Charter Project jointly
sponsored by IHTSDO, the National Health Service in the UK and
Australia’s National e-Health Transition Authority.
“Having accurate and reliable health information when and where needed
saves lives and saves time,” says Jennifer Zelmer (pictured), PhD, a
Canadian who is IHTSDO’s chief executive officer. “By working with
partners from around the world, IHTSDO hopes to increase access to
standards-based solutions that enable the safe exchange of health
information in a privacy-sensitive manner.”
IHTSDO announced that it is seeking proposals for the supply and
maintenance of a SNOMED CT multi-lingual modular workbench that will
host terminology editing, translation, mapping, and other applications.
Open Health Tools (OHT) is managing this process on behalf of IHTSDO.
Open source solutions will be encouraged, but any offerings will be
assessed on their own merits.
The SNOMED CT workbench is part of IHTSDO’s on-going efforts to enable
broader access to, and use of, standardized clinical terminologies
worldwide. Already, nine countries (Australia, Canada, Denmark,
Lithuania, Sweden, New Zealand, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and
the United States) have joined together to support the on-going
development and maintenance of SNOMED CT and related standards,
sharing the costs on a sliding scale, based on national income and
making the standards freely available in their jurisdictions.
IHTSDO also offers free access to SNOMED CT in countries that are not
yet members for qualifying research projects and on humanitarian or
charitable grounds.
IHTSDO also announced that software developers who are building open
source tools using SNOMED CT through an OHT Charter Project can now
access the terminology at no cost.
All software created by OHT will be freely available to anyone,
anywhere, under a commercially friendly open source license (the Eclipse
Public License). Health service organizations and software companies
will be able to use the OHT technology to build products and systems
that will interoperate with other OHT-based products to facilitate
information exchange.
“The challenge for a standards development organization such as the
IHTSDO is to encourage widespread adoption of its standards within the
health sector. Open Health Tools provides an opportunity to engage with
the software development community to accelerate this uptake by
developing open source tools and component libraries which meet their
needs and those of IHTSDO Members,” said Karen Gibson, deputy chair of
IHTSDO and chair of the IHTSDO Technical Committee.
Making it easier to develop robust and interoperable health information
systems is a shared goal for all of the partners in this project. “We
envision a worldwide health information interoperability platform and
tools that will allow patients and their care providers to have access
to vital, reliable, and secure medical information as required. We
anticipate that this will help contain the growth in healthcare costs
and will save lives and improve the quality and safety of care provided
to citizens across the globe,” explained Skip McGaughey, executive
director of Open Health Tools.
About International Health Terminology Standards Development
Organisation (IHTSDO)
The IHTSDO (International Health Terminology Standards Development
Organisation) and its Members seek to improve the health of humankind by
fostering the development and use of suitable standardized clinical
terminologies, notably SNOMED CT, in order to support the safe,
accurate, and effective exchange of health information. The IHTSDO is an
international organisation, established as a Danish not-for-profit
association. Copies of the recently issued Request for
Information/Request for Proposals can be accessed at
https://ihtsdo.projects.openhealthtools.org.
Jennifer Zelmer, CEO of the IHTSDO, previously served as vice president
for research and analysis at the Canadian Institute for Health
Information (CIHI), where she initiated and oversaw an integrated
program of analytical activities, including leading teams responsible
for developing CIHI’s annual report on healthcare in Canada. Prior to
joining CIHI, she worked with a variety of health, academic, and
governmental organizations in Canada, Australia, Denmark, and India,
among other countries. Zelmer has also held positions as an adjunct
lecturer at the University of Toronto, a research associate with the
Research Institute for Quantitative Studies in Economics and Population
at McMaster University, and she is currently a member of a number of
health-related boards and advisory committees
About SNOMED CT
SNOMED Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) is a standardized terminology that can
be used as the foundation for electronic health records and other
applications. For example, different clinicians often use different
terms to describe the same concept. SNOMED CT contains more than 310,000
unique concepts and more than 1.3 million links or relationships between
them that ensure that this information is captured consistently,
accurately, and reliably across the health system. The terminology is
used in more than forty countries around the world. SNOMED CT was
originally created by the College of American Pathologists by combining
SNOMED RT and a computer-based nomenclature and classification known as
Clinical Terms Version 3, formerly known as Read Codes Version 3, which
was created on behalf of the UK Department of Health and is Crown
copyright.
About Open Health Tools
Open Health Tools (OHT) is an open source community with a vision of
enabling a ubiquitous ecosystem where members of the Health and IT
professions can collaborate to build interoperable systems that enable
patients and their professional healthcare providers to have access to
vital and reliable medical information at the time and place it is
needed. IHTSDO is a founding members of OHT.
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