USA
The United States representative to the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO®) is the National Library of Medicine (NLM). NLM provides information services to support the advancement of science, the progress of health care, and the public health. The Library’s electronic information services (including MEDLINE on PubMed.gov, consumer health information on MedlinePlus.gov, molecular biology and genomic resources, and many others) are available free of charge worldwide from http://www.nlm.nih.gov/.
NLM serves as the central coordinating body for clinical terminology standards within the US. The Library supports the development, enhancement, and distribution of clinically specific vocabularies (e.g., SNOMED CT®, LOINC®, RxNorm®) to facilitate the exchange of clinical data and improve retrieval of health information. NLM’s activities in support of health data standardization are described at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/healthit.html.
NLM makes SNOMED CT available in multiple formats, both as part of the Unified Medical Language System® (UMLS®) Metathesaurus®, where it is linked to more than 100 other biomedical terminologies in many languages and to lexical processing tools, and in its native file structure. The NLM distributes SNOMED CT® free of charge to US and international users, under the terms of the standard IHTSDO® affiliate license which is included in the UMLS license agreement. Information about obtaining SNOMED CT from the NLM is available at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/snomed. For more information users should contact NLM Customer service at custserv(at)nlm.nih.gov
