I would like to request feedback from other NRCs regarding a request for addition to the authoring platform.
The U.S. Would like to purpose the additiion of new validation checking to the authoring platform that would compare the authored FSN and PT against the All Editions browser when a new concept is saved. If a duplicate match is found, then a warning would be displayed to the author that indicates they should consider promotion of content from “” extension prior to authoring the new concept.
We understand that this validation will only be available to Managed Services customers and that managed services only represents content from approximately 12 - 14 countries. That being said, we believe the additional validation would help minimize churn of extension content especially in the primitive hierarchies (e.g. organism, substance, etc.)
For example: The following two concepts were added to the international edition in February 2026:
999486261000087101 |Arugula (substance)| (Identical Concept in US Extension since 2016)
1386240002 |Hunting (qualifier value)| (identifical Concept in US Extension since 2014)
While these two concepts have existed in the U.S. Extension for 10+ years, new concepts were authored instead of promotion requests being processed causing the U.S. Extension concepts to be needlessly inactivated.
We believe the additional validation check during the save of new concepts will minimize this from occuring for all managed service NRCs.
Please respond with any feedback by July 1st 2026.
Thank you John for raising this issue. This is not the first instance of such duplication. A report to flag duplicates in this way would be very helpful. Monica
On June 10th we wrote "At our latest Service Review meeting with Terance we were shown the upcoming functionality in CRS that informs a CRS creator if a concept/FSN already exists in another extension. We are exited about this feature and would like to suggest that we could use the same functionality in SCA. So when a creator of a new concept in SCA starts to create a concept that already exists in another extension they get a message and can ask the extension owner to promote the concept instead.
We have also thought that a “soft” message reminding the user to look for similar concepts in the Multibrowser before creating your own in your national extension could be useful."
Great idea John! New Zealand supports this new validation check, as it will help prevent the creation of concepts that already exist in other extensions. I believe this new feature may already be available in CRS. It is a good practice to search for and review similar concepts in the all extension Browser before creating a new term or promoting a concept to SNOMED International.
One question I have is how to proceed when a SNOMED concept already exists in two different national extensions. Which National Release Centre (NRC) should we approach to request permission to promote the concept?
For example, how should we handle a case like “Smoking status (observable entity)”?
When a SNOMED concept already exists in two different national extensions, the National Release Centre (NRC) with the earliest effective date for that concept should be approached for requesting promotion.
I agree with Krista’s response on this, however, I want to refine this information a little bit because this history tab is not always populated with information and given changes over time the effectivetime displayed through the “Information” item on the details page only address the last change (i.e. Snapshot) to the concept/description/axiom. We specifically should be looking at the earliest effectivetime for the concept. The earliest effective time for a description or axiom may not accurately reflect the earliest effectivetime for a concept.
@tshird we need managed services to instruct us on the appropriate way to identify the “creation date” for a concept in the ALL Editions browser so that we are all consistently looking at the same thing. This may require the proper population of the history tab based on the full release file for each extension so that each NRC can readily identify the “earliest effectivetime” for a concept (i.e. the effectivetime for the initial published version of a concept) .
