May 2025 Release of the Canadian Edition of SNOMED CT now available!

Hi Karim,

There are a lot of members here with an abundance of experience that could also assist and provide some guidance and advice, just depending on what the context is that you are working in. Do you work for a Primary Health organization that is trying to map historical content, or a vendor that is working to create a product for primary care organizations, or working on a project to assist with standardization of existing content? Each area (and more) are all slightly different and can benefit from different perspectives and methodology.

Happy to chat if that would help,
Debbie Onos

Hi Karim - Jennifer Lawson here. Happy to connect re: SNOMED CT CA, especially any mapping projects related to PC Dx. I am at CIHI now, working on the Primary Health Care Data Content Standards Development team

Great. For mapping projects it's very important to understand the SNOMED CT hierarchies and how they are intended to be used in an EHR. One of the common mistakes I see is that content is matched to SNOMED based purely on a lexical search.

Take for example, “ulcer” which might be referenced in a dermatology use case. When performing a lexical search, one might identify the concept 56208002 |Ulcer (morphologic abnormality)| before locating 429040005 |Ulcer (disorder)|. Although both have synonyms of "ulcer" the first concept is generally used for concept modeling and refinement. It is the second one (the disorder) which should be used in a diagnosis field.

Great. Thanks Jon. I'll take the course.

Hi Karim,

Many of your questions relate to SNOMED CT's design. For example, all SNOMED CT components have unique identifiers called SCTIDs. Concepts, descriptions (synonyms) and relationships all have unique SCTIDs. The components are linked together using various component fields. Furthermore, the components themselves are version-able. For question #1, it sounds like you might be confusing the Concept SCTID vs the Description SCTID.

Have a look at some of the concepts and descriptions you are referencing in the SNOMED CT browser. I think this should provide some clarity.

Also since you are new to SNOMED CT and you are going to be working with the terminology, you may consider taking the SNOMED CT foundation course. I think the course would provide answers to most if not all of your questions. The course is free to Canadians. Head over to www.snomed.org/education to find information about the course and to register.

Regards,

Jon Zammit

Hi All,

I'm new to the SNOMED group. I've been working with SNOMED CT CA for the last month or so. Here's what I've discovered so far. Any suggestions or advice is highly appreciated.

1. Looking at the Full SNOMED CT CA file, I found >133K/3.6M terms (active =1) which are duplicates, but have different conceptIDs. For example, Osteogenesis imperfecta has 10 different ConceptIDS. Am I doing something wrong?
2. Why do we have the type of data (finding) or (disorder) in the same field as the diagnosis? Shouldn't this be in a separate field?
3. Why do we have stray characters like parentheses and square braces in a diagnosis field?
4. Why do we have synonyms within the same field? E.g., (Acne roscea) or (acne rosacea) or (rhinophyma) or (rosacea). Shouldn't these be in separate records?

All of these things create non-standard features that impede standardization. Am I missing something?

I'm working on matching SNOMED terms to primary care diagnoses from electronic medical records. I'm finding that there are many terms that are missing from the SNOMED dataset. I'm working with the top ~1500 most frequent primary care terms.

How do I go about requesting inclusion of new terms into the SNOMED CT CA Dataset?

Thanks,

K