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The American Medical Association (AMA) and the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO) announced today a new collaborative agreement to coordinate on the design and development of their respective coding and terminology products. By working together, the organizations seek to address the health system’s emerging need for greater integration between proprietary codes sets in support of interoperability and health care data analytics.

AMA’s Current Procedural Terminology (CPT®) is the most widely accepted medical nomenclature used to report medical procedures and services under public and private health insurance programs in the United States. IHTSDO’s SNOMED CT® is the global language of healthcare, an international standard that ensures semantically accurate clinical terminology for consistent use across health systems and services.

The AMA and IHTSDO recognize the complementary nature of their code sets and the critical role they play in health care delivery and administration. By working in tandem, this new collaboration will produce valuable tools for physicians, hospitals, payers and others to organize vital health care data. Additionally, the AMA and IHTSDO will collaborate to promote broader adoption of their content products; share tools and expertise related to the development and maintenance of their respective standards; and improve current content to better support existing and emerging uses of health data.

“We are excited about this new work,” said IHTSDO CEO Don Sweete. “This new agreement focuses on specific projects to develop products that will benefit from the granularity and sophisticated structure of SNOMED CT, and the broad utility and adoption of CPT.”

"IHTSDO and the AMA view this collaboration as an important step toward increasing the coordination and integration of our terminology products to shape a better health care system,” said AMA CEO and Executive Vice President James L. Madara, M.D. “We intend to use this collaboration as a foundation to achieve our shared goals of increased responsiveness to market needs and greater innovation through improved interoperability among ours and related terminologies."