J Korean Soc Med Inform.  2005 Sep;11(3):265-272.

The Expressive Power of SNOMED-CT Compared with the Discharge Summaries

• Kim SH
• Han SB
• Choi J

Abstract

OBJECTIVE
The standard vocabularies need to cover a diverse and enriched field of medical content, thereby facilitating semantic information retrieval, clinical decision support and efficient care delivery. SNOMED-CT(Systematized Nomenclature of Human and Veterinary Medicine-Clinical Term) is a comprehensive and precise clinical reference terminology that provides unsurpassed clinical content and expressivity for clinical documentation and reporting. To investigate whether the SNOMED-CT can serve this function in Seoul National University Hospital(SNUH) environment, we evaluated the coverage of SNOMED-CT as compared with clinical terms in the discharge summary at SNUH.
METHODS
We tested for discordance of clinical terms between SNUH discharge summary and those from SNOMED-CT. We extracted 9,554 concepts from 1,000 discharge summaries. From these concepts, we obtained 3,545 unique concepts which are normalized to map with SNOMED-CT. These normalized terms are mapped to concepts of SNOMED-CT with semi-automatic method.
RESULTS
We found a degree of concordance between SNOMED-CT and the clinical terms used in the discharge summary. Approximately, 89% of medical terms in the discharge summary are matched and 11% of the concepts are not mapped to those of SNOMED-CT.
CONCLUSION
Through this study, we confirmed that SNOMED-CT is appropriate reference terminology in SNUH environment.

Keyword

SNOMED-CT; Concept; Concordance

MeSH Terms

Humans
Information Storage and Retrieval
Semantics
Seoul
Vocabulary