Neighbour spelling in SNOMED CA 2021-09-30 shows the preferred version as being like an American spelling (neighbor)

I'm glad I'm not the only one thinking that one of the main points of using a coding system is to normalize/standardize the items in a list.

I can understand that the medical terms might be more suited to the American spelling, but SNOMED CT covers more than just medical terms. I'd like to see if a Canadian physician/rad/specialist spells neighbour or neighbor.

For ourselves we have to decide what to do, but it'd sure be nice to have this addressed at some point. I know it's not easy, and there are bigger fish to fry.

I was at the meeting at which this unfortunate (yes, that is commentary ) decision was taken, and the argument was that "most" Canadian medical practitioners had been trained using US English textbooks so that they would be most familiar with US English spellings of medical terms. This makes no sense whatsoever to me because we are working with a coding system, but, whatever.

Of course, since the whole point of using a coding system is that you are using codes, not words, to represent concepts, you can display whatever you want. Your system can display a different language for every end user if it is so designed. Furthermore, all the US English and UK English terms should be available, any way, as synonyms, so that searching for a term using either spelling should bring up the correctly coded concept.

Hi Anibal,
The Canadian Edition of SNOMED CT for English concepts is based on the United States of America English language reference set. This is a decision that was made many years ago after evaluating both US and UK differences for some specific patterns. It was found that in Canada we are using rather the US patterns than the UK ones. That being said, you can always decide which one of the terms you will want to display to your users, when those different spelling exist. I hope this helps.

Hi Anibal,

Thank you for raising this point. Full disclosure, I am not sure if this issue has already been discussed within the community.

But in looking at the Canadian Edition of SNOMED CT, it appears as though the Canada English language reference set "generally" aligns with the United States of America English language reference set. This is the SNOMED CT mechanism which specifies the preffered and acceptable synonyms in a given language or dialect. The decision to align was likely made intentionally for practical reasons. But this would explain why we see terms and descriptions which are commonly used in the United States, like we do with these "___our" words. For example:

254935002 |Brain tumor|
247030006 |Color of iris|
112082005 |Inappropriate behavior|
236958009 |Induction of labor|

In terms of whether or not these descriptions are worth updating, that is for the Canadian stakeholders to consider. All changes have an associated complexity and cost. This change would involve establishing new preferred and acceptable synonyms in the Canada English language reference set. Essentially it's a partial translation. An update of key hierarchies such as clinical finding and procedure may offer more value since one could argue that these are more likely to be used in an electronic health record.

It's also worth noting that the Great Britain English language reference set tends to "favour" the ___our synonyms.

It could be interesting to perform a lexical search for terms such as color, behavior, humor, labor, neighbor, etc just to see what we end up with.

Regards,

Jon

Hello all,

Not sure who to share this info with. I'm writing some scripts to mine data from snowstorm and compare that data to some lists we have and I noticed that the concept "neighbor" is spelled as neighbor for the Canadian English FSN and Preferred Synonym.

As far as I know, in Canada we prefer the spelling neighbour.

Looking at the SNOMED CT browser for the 2021-09-30 Canadian Edition you'll notice this:

browser.ihtsdotools.org/?perspective=full&conceptId1=427568008&edition=MAIN/SNOMEDCT-CA/2021-09-30&release=&languages=en,fr

Is this something worth fixing? Am I mistaken on the preferred spelling in Canada?

Thanks,

-Anibal