SNOMED - Systemized Nomenclature of Medicine

SNOMED CT

SNOMED Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) is a dynamic, scientifically validated clinical health care terminology and infrastructure that makes health care knowledge more usable and accessible. The SNOMED CT Core terminology provides a common language that enables a consistent way of capturing, sharing and aggregating health data across specialties and sites of care. Among the applications for SNOMED CT are electronic medical records, ICU monitoring, clinical decision support, medical research studies, clinical trials, computerized physician order entry, disease surveillance, image indexing and consumer health information services.

SNOMED CT combines the content and structure of the SNOMED Reference Terminology (SNOMED RT) with the United Kingdom's Clinical Terms Version 3 (formerly known as the Read Codes).

The SNOMED CT Core terminology contains over 361,800 health care concepts with unique meanings and formal logic-based definitions organized into hierarchies. As of January 2004, the fully populated table with unique descriptions for each concept contains more than 975,000 descriptions. Approximately 1.47 million semantic relationships exist to enable reliability and consistency of data retrieval. It is available in English and Spanish language editions.

see: http://www.snomed.org/snomedct/what_is.html