Sweden's Update April 2008
National activities
Sweden participates in all of the Standing Committees. The current working groups that are of special interest are mapping, mapping standards, translation, concept model, enhanced release format, and machine & human readable concept model and primary care.
A meeting with the organizations of professionals within health care and social care in Sweden was arranged in February 2008 to provide information about our work on SNOMED CT. Many of the organizations want to be involved in future work.
A broad information meeting will be arranged in April 2008 together with our Danish colleagues. The main topics are: what we want to achieve and how SNOMED CT can be used in practice, research, and development.
The National Release Centre is at a very early stage.
Implementation plans/activities
Two major projects are in development. One project addresses the importance of a common terminology within health care and social care with a first priority on elderly care. Another mapping and harmonization project will focus on mapping activities to national, Nordic, and international classifications; coding schemes used in quality registers and quality indicators; and child health data and requirements for the national patient summary. The intention is to collaborate with the international mapping and harmonization work in IHTSDO as well as supporting activities in the WHO-FIC Network context.
Training has been undertaken during workshops at Linköping University (IMT) during 2007 and also within the National Board of Health and Welfare in 2008 – mainly for the project groups (translators, translation reviewer, internal reviewer, and editors) and for project managers.
Subsets have not been developed yet. Pilot projects have only been discussed so far, but will be planned during 2008 together with relevant subsets. The subsets and associated pilots need to use fully translated parts of SNOMED CT into the Swedish language that are not yet available.
Translation plans/activities
Translation is underway. Approximately 10,000 concepts will be translated every month. The translation process is well described and is very similar to the one used in Denmark.
Affiliate activities
Ten affiliate licenses had been issued by February 2008. Most of them were issued to vendors; three are to individual persons. Currently there is no Swedish health record encoded with SNOMED CT.
