I’m not sure this is the right venue to raise this, but we noticed that the SNOMED CT vocabulary concept (https://mq.b2i.sg/snow-owl/#!browse/ohdsi/44819097) has an incorrect description. This makes it difficult for our users to find when selecting an OHDSI vocabulary. There’s also a typo in the curator’s name.
It is currently Systematic Nomenclature of Medicine - Clinical Terms (IHDSTO) but should be changed to one (or both) of the following:
- SNOMED CT (IHTSDO)
- SNOMED Clinical Terms (IHTSDO)
The IHTSDO (International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation) is SNOMED CT’s curator. In the past, SNOMED stood for Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine but that is no longer current (though still widely propagated) since the release of SNOMED Clinical Terms in 2002.
Thanks,
Brandon
@Brandon_Ulrich:
The venue is perfect.
Not sure I follow the proposal: In the VOCABULARY table, the field vocabulary_id = ‘SNOMED’, and the field vocabulary_name = ‘Systematic Nomenclature of Medicine - Clinical Terms (IHDSTO)’. The former is the short form or acronym, the latter the fully spelled out name and the organization responsible for its generation in parenthesis. This is the same for all of them. So, use both of them in conjunction if you want your users to search vocab names.
The only critique I would give you is that the short form is not “SNOMED”, but “SNOMED-CT”. However, we are combining SNOMED-CT international with SNOMED-UK, and the latter usually omits the “CT”. So, we decided to call the mish-mash SNOMED. Other country-specific ones might follow.
Hi Christian,
SNOMED is not SNOMED CT. The former was an acronym (dating back to 1965) the latter SNOMED CT comes from SNOMED RT (from College of American Pathologists) and the UK’s Clinical Terms Version 3 (READ CTV3). So for the terminology in OHSDI, the descriptions must be SNOMED CT or SNOMED Clinical Terms to be correct; simply SNOMED or Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine refer to different terminologies. (To confuse things further, the IHTSDO will be renaming themselves SNOMED International soon…) Maybe I’m too pedantic.
It sounds like the way you’re combining SNOMED CT extensions may lead to problems. You will want to handle the International Edition and any number of extensions. In SNOMED CT jargon, these extensions are modules that are formally declared in Release File 2 Module Dependency Reference Sets. You can only safely combine extensions that have the same module dependencies.
For example, we include the US National Library of Medicine module and the UK clinical and drug (dm+d) modules that are dependent on the January 31, 2015 International SNOMED CT core module. If you don’t support modules, then you wouldn’t be able to include other extensions like the US Veterinarian extension, University of Nebraska Medical College extension, etc. and/or get into problems with dependencies when different versions of (e.g.) dm+d are based on a different module version.
If you choose not to do this, then the “right” way of adding country-specific extensions (called “Editions”) is to simply use their entire Edition, which is guaranteed to include the correct international dependencies–so you don’t need to combine them manually. You could then have separate terminologies for US, UK, AU, SG, etc., but they would all contain duplicates of the International Edition.
Probably a theoretical problem until you try adding another SNOMED CT extension like the Australian Medicines Terminology or Singapore Drug Dictionary…
Best wishes,
Brandon
@Brandon_Ulrich:
Good discussion.
With regard to SNOMED CT vs. SNOMED RT vs. SNOMED vs. SNOP: You are right, but we are trying to be simple. Few people remember those older incarnations. If you say “SNOMED” people generally assume SNOMED-CT these days.
We don’t want to keep the Editions separately. Instead, we would like to have one big mash-up. Reason is that we generally want to avoid duplication of Concepts: The same Concept would potentially pop up in every Edition, and that would kill the idea of general queries that will work on any OMOPed database. I realize we might run into conflicts if, say, the UK and Australia are not based on the same Core version. However, I am not that worried about it: So far we only have UK, and the inner conflicts, glitches and contradictions within SNOMED Core outweigh the potential mismatches across national Editions by far, in my experience.
Let me know what you think.
Hmm. I think you would be fine if you synchronize OHDSI SNOMED CT updates with the national release centers.
At the moment IHTSDO releases at the end of January and July (today!); USA Edition includes this version on first of March / September; UK is April / October; and Australia is end May / end November. So if you update OHDSI twice per year between 1) June and August and 2) December to February, you should avoid conflicts. I don’t know anyone that releases later than Australia.
This will only work for a couple more years, as everyone is moving to more frequent and staggered release cycles, but should be fine for now.
Good idea. Will push it out in a couple weeks with the next release.
Does anybody in the community use Australia, or do you only use that as an example?
We are using it for their terminology subsets and their drug dictionary; however, we can access this outside of OHDSI so it’s not critical for us. Anyone doing analysis with Australian EHR data (Bueller? Bueller?) would presumably be using this as well.
