National activities

During the summer of 2007, a national project team was established to initiate the deployment of SNOMED CT at a national level. Members of this project team are representatives of the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport, The National IT Institute for Healthcare in the Netherlands (NICTIZ), and the department of Medical Informatics at the University of Amsterdam. The Netherlands has a representative on the IHTSDO Quality Assurance Committee and a nomination for the Content Committee to be approved by the General Assembly.

 

A three-year project plan has been drawn up and approved by the national Steering Committee for IT and Innovation. It is an extensive project plan, covering all aspects of a stepwise approach towards the deployment of SNOMED CT at a national level: strategic perspective, communication to and informing all stakeholders, deployment methodologies (pilots), the set-up of a national release centre, and participation in the international arena. To inform stakeholders on the progress of these activities, special Master Classes on the importance of standardization of medical data and the role of SNOMED CT are organized four times per year.

 

Implementation plans/activities

The national project team is currently working on a Call for Pilots. A key aim will be to evaluate the integration of SNOMED CT within Electronic Health Records; content coverage and the ease of developing and maintaining mappings and subsets; the utilization of data for continuity of care and decision support (semantic interoperability and data reuse); and translation, user acceptance, and interface terminologies based on SNOMED CT. Results of these pilots will become publicly available and form the input for further implementation strategies.

 

Translation plans/activities

At this moment, the Netherlands does not have the ambition to translate all SNOMED CT concepts at once. Instead, the translation concepts will be included in the pilots that will be carried out, thus following the stepwise approach of SNOMED CT implementation.

 

Affiliate activities

Several sites (e.g. University Hospital of Utrecht) have been experimenting with SNOMED CT in the past using licenses obtained from the College of American Pathologists. The first affiliate licensing agreements are expected to be signed by the end of April 2008. Parties who have shown active interest in receiving a license will be contacted proactively by the National Release Centre in order to maintain the pace in the distribution of SNOMED CT. There are currently no citizens who have a health record encoded with SNOMED CT in The Netherlands.