London, United Kingdom, Sept. 06, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Cyprus Ministry of Health and SNOMED International jointly announce the addition of Cyprus as the organization’s thirty-fourth Member.

With a developing e-health program across the country’s hospital and health center landscape, Cyprus joins SNOMED International to bring structure and consistency in the sharing of health information for patient care, clinical decision support and research purposes. Within the European region, the promise of cross-border care mobility is believed to be the single most important revolution in healthcare. Preserving the sanctity of patient information through structured data becomes critical to this vision.

SNOMED CT is the world’s most comprehensive and precise health terminology. Founded in 2007 by nine charter nations, SNOMED International is a not-for-profit, member-owned and driven international organization. “SNOMED CT is a core element in building a platform for accurate clinical information exchange and data analysis and SNOMED International applauds Cyprus’s commitment to this vision” states SNOMED International’s CEO, Don Sweete. “With the increasing need to support cross-border health, SNOMED CT is positioned as the best available core reference terminology for cross-border, national and regional eHealth deployments in Europe.”

In recent years, Cyprus is dynamically entering the eHealth era. Codification is an essential part of this journey as health information should be captured, monitored, analyzed and disseminated among health professionals, health policy makers, and the public. Taking part in the European ‘eHealth Network’ project to establish cross border health care, of which the dominant terminology used is SNOMED CT, further supports the need for codification. Through this project, Cyprus has seen this as an opportunity to expand our codification horizons. For this reason, we joined SNOMED CT as a member country, in order to be able to promote health information coding, in a unifying way, among different local health software. The aim of which is to better guide our understanding and comparability of existing health information data.

Vasos Scoutellas, Coordinator of the Health Monitoring Unit of the Ministry of Health recognizes the value of membership in SNOMED International for Cyprus. “At the Health Monitoring Unit of the Ministry of Health of Cyprus, myself, as the coordinator, and my colleagues, fully endorse the promotion, adoption and deployment of SNOMED CT in the health system of Cyprus. With its use, as a country, we will have a uniform way of documenting health issues. This will help us to have better and comparable statistics within the country.”

Cyprus becomes the 21st Member in the European, Middle East and African region to join SNOMED International, setting the expectation for increased interoperability as well as the promise of leveraging learnings amongst its regional and international counterparts. SNOMED CT becomes part of the Cyprus national infrastructure to ensure the exchange of accurate, relevant and timely information across all the information systems to support direct care, self-care and secondary uses of health information.