IHTSDO's nine Charter Members established the Association in 2007. They have now issued active Affiliate licenses to more than 5,000 individuals and organizations. You can get more information about the current Member Countries on their respective home pages on the left side of this page, where the Members' updates from the Activity Report 2007 also are presented.

Members of IHTSDO can be either an agency of a national government or other bodies (such as corporations or regional government agencies) endorsed by an appropriate national government authority within the country it represents. The IHTSDO welcomes new Members. For more information, please see the Join Us section of the website or contact us to discuss this further.

You can also use SNOMED CT outside of Member countries by obtaining an Affiliate License. An Affiliate may be a vendor of products incorporating SNOMED CT, or may be a user of SNOMED CT.

Each national member of IHTSDO has a National Release Center (NRC).

The purpose of a National Release Center is to provide a central (and single) point within the member's jurisdiction to:

• Interface to the IHTSDO
• Interface to other NRCs
• Interface to all entities within the member's territory who have an interest in the products or business of the IHTSDO
• Manage and control the use of the IHTSDO's assets within the member's territory
• Interface to the support organization in line with IHTSDO policies, procedures and regulations. Under normal circumstances there should be no direct contact between entities within a member's territory and the support organization
• Have the total responsibility for distribution and support of the Association's Terminology Products within the  member's territory and the IHTSDO has no obligation to perform or provide any such distribution or support.

See contact details of the National Release Centres here or on each member's homepage.

A workshop on "How Members Manage SNOMED CT: Options & Experiences of National Terminology Release Centres" took place before the start of the IHTSDO April Conference in 2009. The workshop had the following agenda:

1.    Overview of Management and Governance of Member National Release Centres

2.    Technical infrastructure and tooling - Presentation by Gwen Smith

3.    Terminology authoring activities - Presentation by Ian Green & Richard Mountford

4.    Release and Distribution activities - Presentation by Gwen Smith

5.    Reconciliation between International release and Nation extension - Presentation by Ian Green & Ian Arrowsmith                                           

6.    Translation issues - Presentation by Jane Howarth & Lene Vistisen

7.    Cross-mapping activities - Presentation by Hazel Brear

8.    Quality assurance activities - Presentation by Ian Green

9.    Implementation activities - Presentation by Tom Seabury             

10.  Subsets and the challenges they present – Presentation by Ian Arrowsmith                                             

11.  The UK drug extension - Presentation by Emma Melhuish