Information technology  

CAP creates new division to support SNOMED CT terminology

7 May 2007

NORTHFIELD, Ill., USA. The College of American Pathologists (CAP) is renaming its SNOMED International division. The division will now be called SNOMED Terminology Solutions and will focus on education, training and consulting related to SNOMED CT and its implementation.

CAP sold the property rights of SNOMED Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) and its antecedents to the new Denmark-based International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO) last month (April. See news article).

The education and training programs include live and Web teleconference education that detail SNOMED CT's content and structure. Consulting services include assistance implementing SNOMED CT into systems; mapping code sets to SNOMED CT; building and maintaining SNOMED CT subsets and extensions; modeling content (content development); validation; migration from earlier versions of SNOMED; and project-specific coding.

"As global adoption of SNOMED CT continues to increase, the demand for its implementation into electronic health applications grows," said CAP President Thomas Sodeman, MD, FCAP. "SNOMED Terminology Solutions assists in terminology implementation as well as educating the marketplace about SNOMED CT's role in daily use of clinical terminology."

In addition, SNOMED Terminology Solutions will own products not acquired by the IHTSDO including the SNOMED CT Subset Editor Kit, the SNOMED-Encoded CAP Cancer Checklists and CAP Cancer Protocols. It also will retain ownership of domain-specific subsets and cross mappings.

"SNOMED Terminology Solutions will leverage CAP's more than 40 years of experience in the development of SNOMED to aid clients in meeting all of their healthcare terminology needs," said Kevin Donnelly, SNOMED vice president and general manager. "We are already working with clients around the world to provide terminology solutions to enable semantically interoperable electronic healthcare records."

The IHTSDO is assuming responsibility for SNOMED CT's ongoing maintenance, development, quality assurance, and distribution. SNOMED International managed these functions in the past and CAP SNOMED Terminology Solutions will do so under a three-year contract with the IHTSDO.

SNOMED CT is considered to be the most comprehensive, multilingual clinical healthcare terminology available in the world. When implemented in software applications, SNOMED CT represents clinically relevant information consistently, reliably and comprehensively as an integral part of producing electronic health records.

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