Healthcare Series — Intro to Terminologies
Over a period of time, I have been working on a project which deals with health data. When we started working we had a requirement about integrating EHR systems within our application and then pulling EHR data into our system and translating data into as per our data model. This was my first introduction to healthcare systems in my career. While integrating I came to know many words like Terminologies, FHIR, HL7, and FHIR Resources which I had no clue what is what. While I was reading I was fascinated by topic called healthcare terminologies like SNOMED, LOINC, ICD 10, etc. So I started this series to share my learnings. Let’s get started with SNOMED
What is SNOMED CT ?
The abbreviation for SNOMED CT is Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine — Clinical Terms which means it provides a set of Nomenclatures to represent medical data. For example, if you want to represent COVID-19 you enter data as “840539006” rather than text to avoid confusion between healthcare systems. From a normal end-user perspective, we know only COVID-19 but from a healthcare professional perspective, there are different kinds of covid like Long Covid (1119304009), Acute Covid (1119302008), etc. Different kinds of Covid issues need different kinds of care. Hence to provide clarity about what kind of issues patients are suffering these terminologies will come in handy. You can find different SNOMED concepts and their details are here. Here is a screenshot of different kinds of COVID:
Where can we use SNOMED CT?
It has many benefits here are a few:
- Data entry: While recording information like diseases, and symptoms we can provide selection such that users can select accurately rather than vague text entry.
- Analytics: We can easily group information and analyze information for given queries like “How many users are suffering COVID & its related diseases ?”
- Evidence-based care: Since we can standardize data entry and analysis we can run a few computation steps on top of it and provide help in decision-making to healthcare providers.
How to get SNOMED CT?
In India, you can register here and get a license to use it. Once registered, you can download a set of SNOMED files that looks like the below:
We will go into file details in the next series of blog posts about how to load and use it.
Here are resources where you can find detailed information about SNOMED CT and its use cases.
Hope it is useful and stay tuned for the next set of blog posts. Any feedback would be welcome.
Happy New Year!!!! :)