Topic: Medical Informatics Initiative in Germany - Impulse for data sharing and standardization: An update on work

Description: 
The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) launched its medical informatics funding scheme to make data from healthcare and research more useful and meaningful. It provides around 180 million euros with the aim of strengthening medical research and improving patient care. All of Germany’s university hospitals have joined forces with research institutions, businesses, health insurers, and patient advocacy groups to create a framework that harnesses research findings to the direct benefit of patients.
The aim of the Medical informatics Initiative (MII) is to ensure that, in future, each doctor, patient and researcher has access to the information they require – while simultaneously allowing individuals to maintain control over their personal data.

The goal is to establish a way to exchange research and care data across university hospitals. If it proves successful – with the help of funding from BMBF – it will open up entirely new horizons. The solutions that will be developed are expected to create added value across the health system.
The webinar will provide an update on the work of the MII, and focus on terminology services and the MII Core Data set and used terminologies, focusing on the use case of infection control.

Presenters:
Prof. Sylvia Thun (Charité - University Medicine Berlin), Prof. Martin Boeker (Technical University of Munich), Josef Ingenerf (University Lübeck), Cora Drenkhahn (University Lübeck), Joshua Wiedekopf (University Lübeck)

The focus of the presentations was the clinical application of SNOMED CT, focusing specifically on its use in public health and clinical research, and it drew upon the implementation experiences of both presenters
 

Dr. Dal Evans presents: "SNOMED CT implementation in UK general practice (England): A user’s perspective"

The implementation of SNOMED CT within GP clinical systems across England has been underway for a couple of years. This involved a migration from the existing legacy coding systems of Read version 2 and Clinical Terms Version 3 (CTV3) to SNOMED CT. The implications of this implementation for both everyday general practice and national organisations reliant upon data from primary care have been varied. During this session, Dai will explore the transition and impact over the last few years including impact of code mapping, what practices need to do to maintain their the integrity and reliability of their data and will detail his work developing comprehensive data specifications in SNOMED CT, along with tips on what to expect if undertaking similar work.

Dr. Matthew Valentine and Olivier Karasira present "SNOMED CT in the African Community"

To date, SNOMED CT has generally been used in only developed countries. But the benefits that SNOMED CT can bring to healthcare in Africa are immense. Without the burden of entrenched legacy systems, SNOMED CT can empower a range of users, from patients, to care workers, to clinicians, to public health, all in order to deliver better care and better use of scarce resources. In this webinar we will show how a modular, flexible system based on SNOMED CT and FHIR that was developed initially for Allied Health in New Zealand is being adapted and applied for Community Health in Rwanda.  

About Matthew Valentine MD, FACEM, FACEP, PGradDip HlthSci (Clinical Informatics)
Co-Founder & Chief Medical Information Officer, Cure8Health
Clinical Director for Informatics Bay of Plenty District Health Board.
 
Matthew is a residency-trained Emergency Medicine specialist from the US. He has lived and worked clinically in New Zealand since 2008. He has an interest in rural medicine and ensuring that all people, regardless of where they live, get high quality care when and where they need it. This has driven his interest in clinical informatics, and the ways technology can empower people and help support the delivery of quality care. This desire motivates not only his clinical work, but led him to co-found Cure8Health and join forces with The Sovereignty Network.
 

About Olivier Karasira
Project Implementation Lead for Rwanda and Data Champion Lead, The Sovereignty Network
 
Olivier leads the Sovereignty Network's project implementation on the ground in his native Rwanda. He is also the first Data Champion to join The Sovereignty Network™ in Africa. For his efforts, Karasira won the People’s Choice award in the Patient Innovation Track at the HL7™/ FHIR™ DevDays Conference in June 2020. FHIR™ is the de facto global standard for exchanging healthcare information electronically. His story started when he assisted in developing an educational platform in Africa able to generate real-time data for students’ behavior, cognitive load, and health analytics.
 

SNOMED for Clinicians

SNOMED International highly values clinical input into the development and maintenance of SNOMED CT. Clinical engagement ensures that the terminology meets both current and future clinical requirements. The session aims to provide an overview of clinical engagement and the work currently underway within SNOMED International and the broader clinical SNOMED CT community.  The session will be held as part of the SNOMED International Business Meetings and you can register for it on the event website.

Presenter: Dr Tejal Shah 
Tejal is a Lecturer in the School of Computing at Newcastle University where she leads on the design and delivery of multi-disciplinary Continuing Professional Development programmes that focus on digital skills and knowledge development across various domains including the Health Informatics CPD programme. She also teaches and mentors on the the Cyber Security and Software Engineering specialisms in the level 7 Digital and Technology Solutions Specialist Integrated Degree Apprenticeship programme and mentors the apprentices on these programmes.

Previously, Tejal was a Research Associate in the Institute of Health and Society at Newcastle University working on the Connected Health Cities (CHC) Programme where she was involved in designing computational models for consent. Prior to joining Newcastle University, she was a Research Assistant in the School of Information Technologies at the University of Sydney where she worked on the implementation of SNOMED CT in the in-house health information system that was developed as part of a research project.  

Her research interests include knowledge representation and reasoning with a particular focus on the application of semantic web technologies to domains with complex data modelling and analytics requirements such as IoT and healthcare.

Tejal received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; Master of Health Informatics degree from the University of Sydney, Australia; and Bachelor of Dental Surgery (BDS) from Government Dental College, Mumbai, India.

Visit our SNOMED International YouTube channel to access all of our SNOMED CT Clincal Web Series recordings from 2020.

May: One London Project/Using SNOMED CT for Clinical Analytics (Dr. Charles Gutteridge and Sophie Williams)
June: Using SNOMED-CT to articulate and make visible the multifaceted needs of disabled children: an opportunity to improve outcomes? (Karen Horridge)/SNOMED in EZDERM - supporting dermatology requirements (Srdan Prodanovic)
July: Standardized and complete Specimen details in the specimen cross-mapping table (Riki Merrick)/Keytrials - A trial discovery platform. Applying SNOMED to clinical trial annotation to drive semantic searching and EHR integration (Dr Wai Keong Wong) 
August: OpenEHR and the use of SNOMED CT to support clinical analytics (Ian McNicoll and Dr. Peter Hendler)
September: COVID and cancer - The use of real time data and open standards (Monica Jones)/Clinical engagement in Sweden (Daniel Karlsson and Dr. Keng Ling Wallin)
October: Starting from scratch with SNOMED in an EHR implementation. Experience in a global digital exemplar (Dermot O'Riordan)
December: SNOMED CT in a primary care setting to support and improve quality assurance (David Rocha)/GP practice systems in England: lessons learnt and advantages seen during COVID-19 (Denise Downs)

 

Professor Jesualdo Tomás Fernández Breis and Francisco Abad will present: Analysis of readability and structural accuracy in SNOMED CT. 

In the last years our research group has developed ontology quality assurance frameworks such as OQuaRE and OntoEnrich which allow for identifying strengths and flaws in the structure and engineering of the ontologies by exploiting both the logical and lexical content of the ontologies. In this work we will introduce the quality metrics we apply for studying the readability and the structural accuracy of ontologies. Readability quantifies the human-readable content, whereas structural accuracy accounts for the alignment between the lexical and the logical content. We will show and discuss the results of their application to SNOMED CT.

 

 

Dr. Renate Schmidt, Warren Del-Pinto, Dr. Yongsheng Gao will be presenting:
Just the Right Amount - SNOMED CT Content Extraction and Sharing

In this presentation we report on progress in developing a bespoke content extraction and sharing prototype. The prototype is aimed at  supporting users to compute a sub-ontology that succinctly summarizes content in an ontology relating to a narrow focus and enable sharing between different extensions of SNOMED CT. We will illustrate the utility of the ideas in a number of examples.

About Dr. Renate Schmidt
Renate Schmidt is University Reader in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester and leads the Formal Methods Research Group. Her research involves the automation and theoretical analysis of reasoning methodologies of logics relevant to a variety of areas in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. The focus of her current work is the development of tools for ontology re-engineering, including ontology extraction and information hiding, query answering and automated prover generation.

About Warren Del-Pinto
Warren Del-Pinto is a Research Associate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. His PhD research focused on hypothesis generation in knowledge bases via abductive reasoning. His current research interests include developing efficient methods for definition and hypothesis generation in ontologies, and the integration of knowledge-driven reasoning and data-driven learning.

About Dr. Yongsheng Gao
Yongsheng Gao is a senior terminologist at SNOMED International and the co-chair of Modeling Advisory Group with a focus on concept model development and integration with information models for interoperability. He has over 10 years’ extensive experience in terminology authoring, quality assurance and release. He also takes part in the development and review of international health informatics standards.

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Prof. Christian Lovis and M. Christophe Gaudet-Blavignac presented "Sémantique aux Hôpitaux Universitaires de Genève: Le dossier patient, un livre écrit en SNOMED". 

Le Service des Sciences de l'Information Médicale (SIMED) explore le domaine de la sémantique et le potentiel de SNOMED CT depuis de nombreuses années. Cette présentation s'interessera aux recents travaux du service concernant la sémantisation des données médicales aux Hôpitaux Universitaires de Genève, avec un focus particulier sur la list commune des problèmes.

**in French/en français**

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Utilizing the SNOMED CT hierarchy to generate patient-friendly clarifications: challenges and opportunities

The SNOMED CT Netherlands Patient-Friendly Extension contains a limited set of terms and definitions to help laymen understand medical data. In this presentation, Hugo shows how he used this relatively small set, and the SNOMED CT hierarchy, to generate clarifications for a high percentage of all diagnoses. Results from a validation study and plans for further research and development will be discussed.

Presenter: Hugo J.T. van Mens, MSC
PhD candidate at Amsterdam UMC and software developer at ChipSoft

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Topic: Using SNOMED CT relationships for data exploration and discovery in rare diseases - An example in urea cycle disorders

Presenter: Rachel Richesson, PhD, MPH, MS, FACMI, Department of Learning Health Sciences, University of Michigan (US)

Electronic clinical and research data coded with SNOMED CT can be used to accelerate the discovery of detailed clinical phenotypes, which are vital to understanding the pathology and management of rare and emerging disorders. The formal semantic relationships in SNOMED CT can support the exploration and analysis of data to recognize new clinical phenotypes, but methods and tools for using these relationships in clinical analytics or research are not readily accessible. In this webinar, I describe our collaborative approach to semantic-based data exploration in a large research dataset on children with rare Urea Cycle Disorders (UCD). Our approach includes a multi-disciplinary team, a graph database representation of SNOMED CT relationships, and a prototype interactive data visualization tool.

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Dr. Peter Jones presents: Accuracy of Real-Time SNOMED-CT Coding by Clerks and Clinicians: A Case Study in Auckland, New Zealand

Dr. Jones' presentation focuses on audits of the quality of real time clerk and clinician colding of Emergency Department visits using the NZ ED SNOMED CT reference sets.

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About Dr. Peter Jones

Dr. Peter Jones is the Director of Emergency Medicine Research at Auckland City Hospital. He has an MSc in Evidence Based Healthcare from Oxford University and a PhD in Health Sciences from the University of Auckland. He has served on several Australasian College for Emergency Medicine (ACEM) committees and currently sits on the International Federation for Emergency Medicine (IFEM) Research Committee and the Quality Special Interest Group. He has published over 100 articles in the peer reviewed literature and presented more than 60 times at national and international conferences. He chairs the NZ Emergency Medicine Network for research and is currently seconded to New Zealand's Ministry of Health as the Clinical Lead for Acutre Care. He has wide research collaborations internationally, with a broad range of research interests in cluding analgesia, sepsis, thrombosis, acute coronary syndromes, dyspnoea, oxygen therapy,trauma, ED crowding, equity and health systems. He has experience in survey research, observational research, randomised controlled trials and systematic reviews. As a researcher he is especially interested in the quality of source data. Through his Ministry of Health role he has been instrumental in including SNOMED CT in NEw Zealand's National Non-Admitted Patient Data Set, with a view to enabling better quality research and healthcare decision making in the future. 

 

Dr. Vipina Keloth and Dr. James Geller present "Extending import detection algorithms for concept import from two to three biomedical terminologies"

While enrichment of terminologies can be achieved in different ways, filling gaps in the IS-A hierarchy backbone of a terminology appears especially promising. To avoid difficult manual inspection, we started a research program in 2014, investigating terminology densities, where the comparison of terminologies leads to the algorithmic discovery of potentially missing concepts in a target terminology. In this talk, we are extending the algorithmic detection of "candidate concepts for import" from one source terminology to two source terminlogies used in tandem.

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Visit our SNOMED International YouTube channel to access all of our SNOMED CT Research Web Series recordings from 2020.

June: Can Wikipedia (and NLP) Be Used to Derive an Open Clinical Terminology? (Dr. Hoa Ngo)
July: SNOMED CT - OWL in a FAIR web of data (Dr. Ronald Cornet)
August:  Mapping Korean Classification of Diseases and Medical Procedure Codes to SNOMED CT (Dr. Hyeoun-Ae Park)
September: Implementation of a Terminology Server with SNOMED CT in Graph Databases (Elizabeth Silva Layes)
October: Transitioning from Text-Based to Code-Based NLP Rules using SNOMED CT for Data Normalization and Standardization (Michael Denton and Jacee Robison)
November: Bridging the RWD databases across the countries to empower studies on COVID-19 (Dr. Gong Mengchun)

The practical application of SNOMED CT in clinical decision support and integration with GP health records

Presenters:

• Jonathan Olsen: System Architect BPAC CS
• Eric Robertson: Chief Information Officer, BPAC CS
• Ian Rubin: Medical Director, CARE IS

This 90 minute implementation webinar focuses on the practical application of SNOMED CT in clinical decision support in a primary healthcare setting, and the architecture and information management that support it. BPAC Clinical Solution's core business is providing clinical tools and systems to the primary health sector and linking eHealth systems together, within New Zealand, Australia and the UK, to help improve the patient journey. At the heart of these clinical tools are a rules engine and the APIs that provide the ability to read coded clinical data from the patient's record into the rules engine to support clinical decision making and improve efficiency. The rules engine is built using SNOMED CT as the clinical ontology of choice.
 

Visit our SNOMED International YouTube channel to access all of our SNOMED CT Clincal Web Series recordings from 2020.

September: Natural Language Processing and SNOMED CT (Walter Verbrugge, Mathias De Wachter, Dr Md Khadzir bin Sheikh Ahmad and Dr Muhammad Naufal bin Nordin)
December: Implementation Adventures in SNOMEDLand – Lessons learned from 6 years of supporting SNOMED CT adoption in the NHS (Pete Turnbull)