VIDAL Group (1 of 2)

Using SNOMED CT and its mapping to ICD10 in providing clinical decision support for Contraindication checking

EMEA

Clinical Practice, Global/International, Implementation, Mapping, Patient safety

Our medicinal product dictionary offers our users contra-indication checking, so that, when a medication is prescribed, any contra-indications to that medication that are specific to that patient can be directly alerted to the prescriber. To do this, patient-specific clinical information is input to the system, currently as ICD10 codes, because this is what is available in our customer systems. But there is a growing requirement to offer users SNOMED CT to directly input information into patient records, and our customers wish to be able to use SNOMED CT concepts as input to our decision support. We also welcome this because it will give us more clinically relevant concepts to map to, with greater precision and therefore we can offer more accurate, less noisy and therefore more clinically acceptable decision support.

Description

This presentation is concerned with the use of the SNOMED CT to ICD10 map and how this could help a medicinal product dictionary providing clinical decision support currently based on ICD10 to move towards also being able to use SNOMED CT. Like SNOMED CT, ICD10 has various national extensions, these need to be considered as part of the mapping process.

Scope

Although electronic patient records are not as widely used in some parts of Europe as in others, now that France and Germany have joined the SNOMED family, there is more interest from system providers to use SNOMED CT for documenting patients' clinical information. So SNOMED CT concepts could now be used as an input to our clinical decision support, and particularly to contra-indication checking, rather than currently only using ICD10, which is not fully satisfactory, for a number of reasons.

How SNOMED CT will be used

Although the SNOMED CT to ICD10 map is not in the direction that would be ideal for this use case, the proposition is that it could still provide some value towards providing initial mappings that can then be developed further by the expert team, rather than starting with an empty space. By taking the subset of ICD10 that is mapped to our contra-indications and finding the SNOMED CT concepts that are mapped to this, we have a starter set of SNOMED CT concepts mapped to our contra-indications that we can examine, learn from validate (or not) and add to as required, and through this, to fully develop our own mapping editorial policy.