2010 Update

National Activities
Singapore is establishing a National Electronic Health Record (NEHR) as part of a clinically-driven national IT program and SNOMED CT is part of the solution. To address the challenges NEHR has faced in the pursuit of semantic interoperability, Singapore has established a clinically-driven National Standards Programme (NSP). 

An integral part of the NSP is the establishment of the NRC, whose operational processes are being streamlined. A Singapore Drug Dictionary (SDD) is being developed and is expected to be released as part of the Singapore Extension of SNOMED CT dependent on the completion of the IHTSDO pharmacy redesign project. National subsets have also been released for diagnoses for the acute care sector and with primary care and subacute care to follow within the next year.

Implementation Plans/Activities
As part of Singapore's pragmatic approach to harmonizing relevant standards, the Singapore Logical Information Model (LIM) has been designed based on existing standards (ISO 136060-1, ISO 210900 and SNOMED CT) to enable the exchange of healthcare information between different healthcare providers. Currently our main focus is on the semantic interoperability of diagnosis and medication data across the different healthcare sectors using SNOMED CT International Release supported by the Singapore Extension. Some high-level-use cases for SNOMED CT in Singapore are:

• Reference Terminology: Diagnosis codes captured in the NEHR solution use SNOMED CT as the reference terminology and the SDD will be made available as an Extension of SNOMED CT.
• Interoperability: The Singapore LIM's logical representation allows SNOMED CT to be used with an Information Model (ISO 13606-1), as part of a specification designed to facilitate data interoperability.
• Subsets: Exploration of the possibility of creating SNOMED CT diagnosis subsets for specialties like primary care, emergency medicine, dermatology, laboratory and radiology orders and medication related information and procedures.
• Interface Terminology: Exploration of the possibility of using SNOMED CT descriptions as the interface terms in some of the solutions being evaluated.

Affiliate Licensees/Activities
There are 11 affiliate licensees in Singapore. Most institutions are in the exploratory stage.