National activities

NLM promotes use of SNOMED CT as part of a suite of vocabulary and messaging standards needed for nationwide, interoperable infrastructure for health information technology. NLM will build upon the IHTSDO’s new Workbench to develop an open and transparent process, accessible to all stakeholders, for coordinating U.S. input to the IHTSDO for SNOMED CT development.

 

In 2008, we continued to facilitate discussions between IHTSDO and the Regenstrief Institute for the harmonization of SNOMED CT and LOINC^®, and between IHTSDO and the American Dental Association (ADA) regarding intellectual property rights for some dental content in SNOMED CT and the involvement of the ADA in future development of dental content.

 

Implementation plans and other activities

Within the U.S., SNOMED CT is used for:

•    normalizing data stored in clinical data warehouses

•    indexing full-text clinical reports with controlled terminology (generally via natural language processing and use of the UMLS resources)

•    public health reporting

•    a variety of information indexing and retrieval applications (for example, in PubMed/MEDLINE).

 

Affiliate activities

NLM distributes SNOMED CT internationally as part of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus. Licensees of the UMLS Metathesaurus have access to SNOMED CT (both English and Spanish versions) in multiple formats as part of the UMLS Metathesaurus. UMLS licensees have free access to SNOMED CT in its native file formats, downloaded directly from the UMLS Knowledge Sources Server.

We held the second annual UMLS Users meeting to obtain UMLS Licensee’s comments and suggestions for improving UMLS data, tools, documentation, and support, and to improve UMLS and SNOMED CT resources available on the NLM Web site. Most of our webcasts include a discussion on accessing and using SNOMED CT through the UMLS Metathesaurus or mapping from SNOMED CT to other important vocabularies.

 

Number of Affiliate Licensees

5026 UMLS licensees:

•    3316 US Licenses

•    1708 International Licenses 

 

Links to web pages

UMLS Page: www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/

SNOMED CT Page: www.nlm.nih.gov/&

Affiliate License Page: wwwcf.nlm.nih.gov/umlslicense/snomed/license.cfm