The Expressive Power of SNOMED-CT Compared with the Discharge Summaries.
- Author:
Seung hee KIM
1
;
Seung Bin HAN
;
Jinwook CHOI
Author Information
1. Department of Biomedical Engineering, College of Medicine, Seoul National Univ. jinchoi@snu.ac.kr
- Publication Type:Original Article
- Keywords:
SNOMED-CT;
Concept;
Concordance
- MeSH:
Humans;
Information Storage and Retrieval;
Semantics;
Seoul;
Vocabulary
- From:Journal of Korean Society of Medical Informatics
2005;11(3):265-272
- CountryRepublic of Korea
- Language:Korean
-
Abstract:
OBJECTIVE: The standard vocabularies need to cover a diverse and enriched field of medical content, thereby facilitating semantic information retrieval, clinical decision support and efficient care delivery. SNOMED-CT(Systematized Nomenclature of Human and Veterinary Medicine-Clinical Term) is a comprehensive and precise clinical reference terminology that provides unsurpassed clinical content and expressivity for clinical documentation and reporting. To investigate whether the SNOMED-CT can serve this function in Seoul National University Hospital(SNUH) environment, we evaluated the coverage of SNOMED-CT as compared with clinical terms in the discharge summary at SNUH. METHODS: We tested for discordance of clinical terms between SNUH discharge summary and those from SNOMED-CT. We extracted 9,554 concepts from 1,000 discharge summaries. From these concepts, we obtained 3,545 unique concepts which are normalized to map with SNOMED-CT. These normalized terms are mapped to concepts of SNOMED-CT with semi-automatic method. RESULTS: We found a degree of concordance between SNOMED-CT and the clinical terms used in the discharge summary. Approximately, 89% of medical terms in the discharge summary are matched and 11% of the concepts are not mapped to those of SNOMED-CT. CONCLUSION: Through this study, we confirmed that SNOMED-CT is appropriate reference terminology in SNUH environment.
