SNOMED International has renewed its agreement with the American College of Surgeons (ACS), through its American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) program. The renewed three-year agreement advances both organizations’ commitment to improving the diagnosis and treatment of cancer patients globally.
The ACS is dedicated to improving the quality of care of surgical patients, including cancer patients requiring surgery, safeguarding standards of care in an optimal and ethical practice environment, and setting the standard for surgical care in the United States. Evidence-based anatomic staging is the critical factor to understanding cancer and treating patients and new breakthroughs are opening up ever-more promising possibilities for precisely defining a prognosis and recommending a treatment based on a patient's individual data. The AJCC has developed and compiled cancer staging references for quickly finding important information about different types of cancers. These references and tools are excellent resources for those treating patients with cancer.
SNOMED International is an international not-for-profit organization that develops and promotes the use of SNOMED CT, a comprehensive, multilingual healthcare terminology created for use by healthcare professionals to capture the care of individuals in an electronic health record and facilitate sharing, decision support and analytics, to support safe and effective health information exchange. The purpose of SNOMED International is to develop, maintain, promote, and enable the uptake and correct use of its terminology products in health systems, services and products around the world. Up to date AJCC content contributes to the comprehensive and quality assured nature of SNOMED CT for its Members, affiliates and stakeholders in the United States and globally.
The renewal of the collaboration agreement furthers the work SNOMED International began in 2020 with the establishment of the Cancer Synoptic Reporting Project Group, which was formed to develop comprehensive SNOMED CT concepts suitable for structured pathology reports. It includes pathology experts who provide input from the community of practice on the development, maintenance and use of SNOMED CT in this specific domain. Their work contributed to the 2024 release of the SNOMED CT Clinical Implementation Guide for Cancer Synoptic Reporting, a comprehensive resource to facilitate standardized and structured reporting in cancer care.
Renewed commitment details
As part of the renewed agreement, the AJCC will provide SNOMED International with a comprehensive list of Allowable Values (codes), without definitions. The list will include allowable values in the AJCC Cancer Staging System. However, the AJCC will not provide definitions for these Allowable Values and users will require permission to use the definitions from the ACS. The AJCC may create other Allowable Values in future versions of the AJCC Cancer Staging System and will provide them to SNOMED CT at time of publication.
"The work we have achieved between the AJCC and SNOMED has helped bring cancer staging content to more patients and providers. We look forward to continuing this collaboration to improve cancer care in the U.S. and around the world," said Ronald J. Weigel, MD, PhD, MBA, FACS, Medical Director for ACS Cancer Programs.
Other elements of the agreement focus on further details of Allowable Values and Qualifier values use in SNOMED CT, as well as on AJCC-related tumour staging concepts in the SNOMED CT Clinical findings hierarchy.
SNOMED International CEO Don Sweete hails the renewed agreement as a significant step forward in understanding and treating cancer. “The work we have accomplished together to date provides a strong foundation on which to build and to better equip clinicians and others working in cancer-related care to understand, diagnose and treat patients with cancer,” he says. “Our renewed collaboration with the ACS also further bolsters the value and utility of SNOMED CT.”
Visit the American College of Surgeons, the American Joint Committee on Cancer, and SNOMED International for more information.
Media Inquiries:
American College of Surgeons
Dan Hamilton
Email: dhamilton@facs.org
SNOMED International
Kelly Kuru
Email: comms@snomed.org