Country / Region
Americas
Tags
Clinical Practice, Data analytics, Innovation, Mapping, Tooling, Translation
Canada Health Infoway has approved a project to work with Quebec and other interested jurisdictions in Canada to develop a Canadian SNOMED CT drug extension, known as the Canadian Medicines Terminology (CMT). The CMT project is a substantial, multi-year initiative with an objective to deliver long-term value to the healthcare ecosystem. This will be achieved by enabling digital health systems to leverage a pan-Canadian drug data standard, which aligns with SNOMED CT's formal concept model and contains logical definitions for computable queries and clinical decision support. The CMT's design is based directly on SNOMED International's standardized national drug extension model, with additional enhancements to support Canadian-specific requirements. This is an essential enabler for supporting both national and international semantic interoperability. The presentation will describe the CMT's requirements, use cases, schedule, data model, development process, challenges, and achievements.
Description
The Canadian Medicines Terminology (CMT) project was initiated, following a request from the Quebec jurisdiction, to provide a clear and unambiguous dictionary of drug products. The intended use cases include prescribing, dispensing, administering, sharing (medication lists), purchasing (supply chain), storing (inventory management), reimbursing, analyzing, contraindication checking, and enabling pharmacovigilance. The scope of the CMT project includes both Health Canada-approved drugs, identified by a Drug Identification Number (DIN), and Health Canada-approved Natural Health Products (NHPs) identified by a Natural Product Number (NPN).
Building on the success of the Canadian Clinical Drug Dictionary (CCDD), the SNOMED CT Canadian Drug Extension aims to enhance the Canadian healthcare system's ability to manage and exchange drug information by integrating regulatory data from the Canadian Drug Product Database (DPD) into the SNOMED CT terminology. To facilitate this integration, a map has been created from extracted DPD data to SNOMED CT CA drug extension concepts, allowing for consistent and interoperable data representation across different sources.
This presentation will provide an overview of the new CMT project, highlighting the partnership between Infoway, the Quebec Health Ministry, TermMed, and SNOMED International. It will introduce the Canadian SNOMED CT drug extension model, and explain the challenges, benefits, and lessons learned related to the prerequisite data transformations, mappings, pre-authoring work, team management, tooling enhancements, and modeling of complex drug products.
Scope
SNOMED CT meets the criteria of interoperability, clinical accuracy, continuous evolution and international standardization. The SNOMED CT CA Edition supports the addition of French synonyms, allows for regionalization, and the inclusion of non-pharmaceutical products.
Adding drug content to the Canadian SNOMED CT Edition, ensures solid interoperability in clinical data exchange and benefits from the ongoing updates and advances in medical terminology. The collaboration between Quebec and Infoway leverages the shared Canadian Standards Release Centre's tools for authoring and request for change (RFC) at minimal cost. Access to appropriate tools is essential and offers flexibility in the process management.
How SNOMED CT will be used
SNOMED CT's concept model is leveraged to automatically create fully defined drug extension concepts to support the following use cases:
-Prescribing and dispensing;
-Clinical decision support to ensure medication safety by performing contraindication and drug schedule checking, at the time of prescribing and dispensing;
-Supply chain, inventory management and reimbursement
-Pharmacovigilance for adverse event reporting and post marketing surveillance.
The CMT development process begins by first mapping source data components from Health Canada's Drug Product Database (DPD) to the required attribute value concepts in the SNOMED CT CA Edition, using the Snap2SNOMED mapping tool. Drug regulatory data is then extracted into an intermediate data format for validation by a team of Canadian pharmacists. The required concept, defining and non-defining relationships, annotations, and preferred descriptions (in both English and French) are then created for each CMT class, using predefined modelling and description templates.
Why SNOMED CT will be used
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