03 Mar Standardized Classification of Medical Services (SNOMED)
Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms, commonly known as SNOMED CT, is the most comprehensive, multilingual clinical terminology in the world, encompassing more than 300,000 concepts, along with terms, synonyms, and definitions. It was specifically designed to be a standard for electronic health information exchange.
SNOMED CT clinical concepts are organized hierarchically and represented by multiple levels of granularity.
Hierarchies include:
- Body Structure
- Clinical Finding
- Event
- Procedure
- Social Context
- Substance
SNOMED CT structure comprises four components:
- Concept file: codes that identify unique objects
- Description file: terms that explain the concept
- Relationship file: associations between related concepts
- Hierarchy file: hierarchical structure
For example, the number representing the common cold may be linked to such descriptions as “common cold”, “acute coryza”, “acute infective rhinitis”, “cold” or “head cold”.
How SNOMED CT is used
SNOMED CT was specifically designed to be a standard for electronic health information exchange, as it is essential for recording and sharing clinical data such as patient problem lists and family, medical, and social histories in EHRs.
It remains an excellent tool today in achieving requirements put forth by Medicare and Medicaid’s Promoting Interoperability Programs, as it is the foundation for storage, retrieval, and exchange of electronic health data. Its usefulness can be further leveraged through mapping to other international standards, such as ICD-X or CPT to better facilitate semantic interoperability. For instance, when clinical terms are seamlessly mapped between ICD and SNOMED CT, revenue cycle efficiency and accuracy are boosted by eliminating productivity losses that would be associated with trying to identify the correct code from ICD-10.
Hospitals can use SNOMED CT to improve the quality of care they provide to patients. It can be used to support various healthcare-related activities such as billing, administrative reporting, clinical decision support systems, public health reporting, quality measurement, and healthcare analytics.
For instance, SNOMED CT can help hospitals in the following ways:
- Billing: SNOMED CT can be used to support billing processes by ensuring that medical procedures and diagnoses are accurately coded and billed
- Clinical decision support systems: SNOMED CT can be used to develop clinical decision support systems that provide clinicians with relevant information at the point of care. This can help improve the accuracy of diagnoses and treatment plans.
- Administrative reporting: SNOMED CT can be used to support administrative reporting by enabling the collection and analysis of data related to hospital operations, such as patient admissions, discharges, and transfers
- Healthcare analytics: SNOMED CT can be used to support healthcare analytics by enabling the analysis of large amounts of clinical data. This can help identify patterns and trends and develop strategies to improve patient outcomes.
- Public health reporting: SNOMED CT can be used to report public health data to local, state, and national health agencies. This can help in developing effective public health policies.
- Quality measurement: SNOMED CT can be used to measure the quality of care provided by hospitals. This can help identify areas for improvement and develop strategies to enhance patient outcomes.
Grihasoft is one of the pioneers in providing the SNOMED classification services to hospitals. Grihasoft understands the need and requirement of the hospitals for the coding and provide relevant services to work on specific tasks for clients.
SNOMED CT helps the hospitals in the following ways
- Simplify data governance by centralizing and managing reference data.
- Enable interoperability and normalize clinical, claims, and administrative data.
- Optimize your analytics and ensure regulatory compliance
- Providing analytical solutions that can be customized to your organization’s needs.
While SNOMED CT is a comprehensive and multilingual clinical terminology that encompasses a vast array of medical concepts, there are some challenges associated with its use.
For one of leading hospital chains in India, Grihasoft was able to map services to SNOMED to create a centralized database which could provide all kinds of insights at a central level even though individual hospitals naming preferences varied. Grihasoft was able to provide a database wherein centralized repository which in turn linked to individual services of hospitals, which helped in Analytics, EHR, Data governance, compliance, etc.,
Here are some of the challenges:
Concept definition issues: SNOMED CT concepts can have multiple definitions, which can lead to confusion and inconsistency in their use. It can be challenging to determine which definition is appropriate for a given context.
SNOMED CT is updated regularly, which can make it challenging to maintain consistency across different versions of the terminology. It can be difficult to ensure that all systems are using the same version of SNOMED CT.
To identify the classification / terminology to existing services and covering the versioning changes Grihasoft has a specialized team to provide these services which in turn affects the outcome of the hospitals needs
By standardizing the way health IT systems terminologies, SNOMED CT enables consistent representations and reproductions of clinical content in EHRs. Other applications can use it for clinical decision support systems, laboratory, emergency room and patient reporting. To ensure that these systems can leverage all that, it’s important to keep up to date with the latest releases, including mapping across other healthcare terminologies.
Similar to SNOMED-CT, LOINC is a preferred choice for Lab related services.
Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC) and SNOMED CT are two popular coding standards in the health IT (HIT) industry, specifically in medical testing. Both standards, though different, attempt to baseline the terminology used by healthcare professionals across the world in order to avoid error when handling patient data.
LOINC was first developed in 1994 as single, electronic database to act as a comprehensive dictionary. The LOINC provides universal code system for tests, measurements and observations has provided a common vocabulary for electronic health records.
Both LOINC and SNOMED CT codes help tremendously with continuity in healthcare, especially as the use of EMR/EHR’s are being mandated. Although advantageous, these coding languages require a lot of detailed work to complete the transition. It requires a healthcare professional to define and sync the standard terminology to the users list and make sure it is accurate.
Grihasoft is uniquely capable of handling these intricacies and provide a crucial cog in the implementation of these standards. For more information contact Grihasoft.
For more information about our service offerings visit www.grihasoft.com
