Health Terminologies

Hello all. This is a cross posting. The Health Analytics Community is hosting the Public Health Agency of Canada on Thursday, Sept 23, 2:00-4:00 PM (Eastern) and will focus on the development of a pan-Canadian Health Data Strategy. The initiative aims to support the effective creation, exchange, and use of critical health data for the benefit of Canadians and the health and public health systems they rely on. The purpose of this virtual meeting is to hear views on how we should work together to formulate a strategy to overcome the barriers that have prevented progress in the past, to identify and prioritize strategies to address root causes and to develop and plan for an environment in which new ideas will flourish. We believe that the unique insights, experiences, and knowledge you hold with regard to this topic would be invaluable in helping to inform the development of this strategy. We value your participation. The link to the event: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/170857548527

Thank you all for contributing to this discussion. We appreciate your collaboration and partnership on this issue. Summary: An issue was reported by Anibal from QC related to space-encoding in the March 2021 CA Edition release package RF2 files. Upon investigation, it appears to be that extended ASCII encoded non-breaking spaces (NBSP) are present in the files instead of the expected regular space . It was found that the NBSPs were introduced into the files via copy / paste functions from HTML based tools. Our technical team found “…32 in the delta, 75 in the snapshot, and 112 in the full. That means that 32 are new in this release, there are 43 existing ones from previous releases, and 37 that were once published as NBSPs and replaced later.” This issue will be corrected in releases going forward, and all spaces will be encoded with regular space ASCII . Anibal has confirmed that preprocessing has addressed the issue. Given the imminent release of the September 2021 CA Edition, and the fact that re-issuing the March release will create a much larger impact than simply correcting the issue in subsequent releases, new March 2021 CA release files will not be generated. The NBSPs will remain. Implementers are advised to use the September 2021 CA Edition Release.

This is one of a series of briefing notes related to Content Improvements in the Substance and Product Hierarchies. The purpose of this briefing note is to seek feedback from the SNOMED CT Members for poisoning concepts that are defined by a causative agent that is of type “medicinal product role” e.g. 290578000 |Antineoplastic poisoning (disorder)| or “Medicinal product role + structure” e.g. 290950009 |Barbiturate antiepileptic poisoning (disorder)|. For each concept, kindly advise: - What is the frequency of use? - If in use, provide supporting use-case(s) specifically, please clarify why the poisoning concept is used in place of an adverse reaction or overdose defined by the same causative agent. Please provide feedback to the project group via info@snomed.org by September 20, 2021. Thank you!

Purpose To obtain feedback from (MF/CMAG) on the suggested inactivation of concepts which refer to the intent of an endoscopy procedure as diagnostic or therapeutic. Background Following a customer request for a new concept, Diagnostic colonoscopy (procedure), an internal review examined the use case for this and similar existing concepts. Including the intent of a procedure in the description is currently a precoordination pattern that is generally not allowed in the international edition but legacy content exists in this format. Identifying the intent of a procedure can be problematic as a procedure may be ordered as diagnostic but during theprocedure a therapeutic process is undertaken e.g., polyp removal during a routine colonoscopy. Additionally the context of the procedure will be clear from other information in the clinical record. Issues Creating a new concept Diagnostic colonoscopy (procedure) as a subtype of 73761001|Colonoscopy (procedure)| could result in implementation issues where the existing concept has already been used for diagnostic purposes. This issue would apply to any requests for diagnostic or therapeutic endoscopy procedure concepts where the agnostic concept exists. It is not thought that this would impact procedure planning activities as endoscopy units are prepared for the procedure to change course if required. Inactivation of endoscopy procedures stating intent as diagnostic or therapeutic: 77 concepts affected, 363071007 |Diagnostic endoscopy (procedure)| and its subtypes together with 7 therapeutic concepts. Next Steps We propose this format continues to be disallowed in favour of content that is agnostic to intentand inactivation of existing concepts would be the preferred approach. The inactivation reason would be non-conformance to editorial policy and our intention is to add a historical association of “REPLACED_BY” to an appropriate target replacement concept once the updated concept inactivation reasons have been implemented in the authoring tooling. SNOMED International would appreciate any feedbackon the proposed inactivation of this content before September 13. Thank you!