SNOMED CT®, the 'Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms', is the clinical terminology approved as a Fundamental Standard by the Information Standards Board for Health and Social Care for use within the NHS in England.
Requirements for utilising SNOMED CT® are stated within the National Information Board ‘Framework for Action' with further details approved by the Standardisation Committee for Care Information (SCCI) in August 2014 (Item 9 on the agenda). SNOMED CT® is licensed for use in more than fifty countries and is free to deploy in systems used within the UK.
SNOMED CT® provides the clinical language that facilitates electronic communication between healthcare professionals in clear and unambiguous terms, and can be used to code, retrieve and analyse clinical data.
SNOMED CT® is very comprehensive and provides clinical terms for all healthcare professions. Applications thus often use subsets of SNOMED CT® that have been developed to support specific requirements. The NHS Data Model and Dictionary highlights where SNOMED CT Subsets exist to support data reporting for specific data items.
Note: Those using the Release Format 2 (RF2) of SNOMED CT® will be aware that SNOMED CT Subsets are implemented via the 'refset mechanism'. The UK RF2 release includes a file that provides the corresponding refset details for each SNOMED CT Subset. For further details please see the RF2 Overview.
SNOMED CT® is managed and maintained internationally by the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO) and in the UK by the UK Terminology Centre (UKTC).
National and International arrangements have been established to ensure there is adequate and relevant governance of SNOMED CT®, to ensure it meets the needs of healthcare in the respective jurisdictions: