Turning classical medical information into “living” smart data

These developments form part of a larger initiative regrouping Belgian hospitals and software vendors who wish to promote implementation of the SNOMED CT terminology in their EHRs.

For more information about this Consortium, please visit the CSCT website at http://www.csct.be.

SNOMED CT will be used to capture the clinical meaning at the point of care either through structured fields or after parsing and recognition of medial expressions in free text zones. The primary targets will be the discharge summary, problem list and allergies. Language refsets will be used, both for capture and display, as we are a French/Dutch speaking country. The data will be captured both with pre-coordinated concepts and if needed with post-coordinated expressions. 

Creation of local SNOMED CT content (namely for scales) is planned. SNOMED CT driven queries will be run against the data to provide the expected "smart" functionalities: alerts, propositions of clinical pathways, etc.

SNOMED CT was selected because it has the broadest medical terminology coverage, allows for creation of medical expressions that can be understood by a machine through post-coordination and its defined grammar) and because SNOMED CT was the terminology chosen in the Belgian e-Health roadmap.