National Content Development Updates for the October 2025 meeting

SNOMED Groups Content Managers AG
1

Hi all,

One of the topics at the October CMAG meeting will be National Content Development Updates. Please add your countries update as response to this discussion topic in preparation for the meeting.

Thanks!

1 Like
2

Hi everyone,

A reminder to add your content development updates as a comment on this topic prior to the Antwerp meeting.

Kind regards,

Cathy

3

Hi Cathy,

Thank you for your offer. For this meeting the Danish NRC does not have any ongoing projects with new concepts that are relevant from an international perspective.

Best wishes,

DK NRC

1 Like
4

Hi Cathy,

The UK NRC has been working on lateralising imaging procedures in our extension, with the intent of promoting these to the International Edition, so far we have added laterality to 676 concepts, resulting in the creation of 1749 concepts, we still have around 30 to look at that we weren’t able to do in bulk.

Many thanks,

Graeme

1 Like
5

Hi all,

Belgium is developing a drug extension, which requires the creation of new national content.

Three mapping projects are currently in progress — SNOMED CT to ICF, ICHI, and ICPC-3. These will likely result in reports identifying several missing SNOMED CT concepts, which will need to be addressed to achieve full mapping coverage.

EHDS-related content is also high on our priority list.

Most of our current CRS requests originate from ongoing hospital implementation projects and the content gaps identified through them.

Kind regards, Katrien

2 Likes
6

Hi,

From the Swedish NRC:

1. Radiology – A major initiative is currently underway in one of Sweden’s largest healthcare region, focusing on imaging concepts. The project owner has expressed interest in working with imaging terminology through Snomed International. The initial proposal was to explore the possibility of establishing a clinical reference group in this area.

2. Microbiology – A national working group is identifying microbiological concepts for use in Sweden. The group has also established contact with France to align and coordinate needs across countries.

3. Medical Birth Register – A pilot project has been launched to replace certain registry variables with Snomed CT codes. This will likely generate a need for new concepts. A new electronic health record system is also being implemented in several Swedish regions for maternal care and obstetrics, and it will incorporate Snomed CT.

4. Health and Lifestyle Declarations – New national concepts related to health declarations and lifestyle habits are being created during 2025.

5. Nutrition and Nursing – Work is ongoing on three refsets of NCPT (Nutrition Care Process Terminology) based on existing content. In the area of nursing, a Research and Development Center is planned for ICNP (International Classification for Nursing Practice) in Sweden. The work will be closely coordinated with the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (SKR) and a Swedish Nursing ICNP expert group in collaboration with the Swedish NRC.

6. Cannula / Catheter / Tubes – A big region in Sweden is currently working on standardizing documentation for cannulas and catheters with Snomed CT. The review includes assessing whether existing international Snomed CT concepts are sufficient or if new concepts need to be developed.

Kind regards,

Sofia

1 Like
7

Irish NRC

Microbiology Diseases:

Clinical Terminologists from Irelands NRC worked closely with Clinical leads from a national working group to develop a Notifiable Infectious Disease Register refset for use in Ireland. There are 101 terms in this refset.

Microbiology Organisms:

Clinical Terminologists from Irelands NRC worked closely with Clinical leads from a national working group to develop a Notifiable infectious Disease Causative Organism Register refset for use in Ireland. There are 399 terms in this reference set.

Community Connects (Palliative Care. And Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services CAHMS)

Clinical terminologist from Irelands NRC are currently working with clinical leads from a national group to develop reference sets for use by Palliative care and Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in Ireland. Both of these projects will contain a high number of concepts.

Maternity Sepsis:

Clinical terminologists from Irelands NRC worked with clinical leads from a national working group of nurse to develop a maternity sepsis reference set for use in Ireland. This refset has 48 terms.

National Institute for Cardiovascular Outcomes Research (NICOR):

Clinical terminologists from Irelands NRC recently worked with clinical leads from Childrens Hospital Ireland to add to a previously created reference set titled “Children Health Ireland SNOMED Map to The National Institute For Cardiovascular Outcomes Research Refset Ireland”. 238 terms were added to this

Precision ALS and MS:

Clinical terminologists from Irelands NRC are currently working with clinical researchers from Precision ALS and Trinity College Dublin to create two reference sets for use in Ireland, the U.K. and many European countries. The first reference set will contain concepts related to Motor Neuron Disease and the second will contain concepts related to Multiple Sclerosis. The SNOMED CT codes will be used in the Precision platform to capture data about both conditions. This data will be used for research purposes.

1 Like
8

Graeme,

Were the 676 imaging concepts already extant in the International release or did you need to add laterality agnostic concepts as well?

9

Irish NRC
Mental state exam:

Clinical Terminologists from Irelands NRC worked closely with Clinical leads from Irelands new National Children’s Hospital to develop a Mental State Exam refset. Epic – the new EHR – which will go live with the opening of the new children’s hospital.

1 Like
10

New Zealand NRC

National Content Development Updates:

1. Healthcare service types

We have been working with a commercial provider of a national health service directory that lists health providers, health facilities and health services for the benefit of patients and referring clinicians. Directory service listings are classified and marked up using purpose-built SNOMED CT reference sets, centred on health service types. The healthcare service type definitions use patient friendly terms in both New Zealand English and te reo Māori.

2. New Zealand Breast Device Registry

A set of SNOMED concepts has been developed to support recording medical information and device tracking in the New Zealand Breast Device Registry (NZBDR). This information is used to audit complications for women of New Zealand who receive breast devices. The registry makes it possible to trace patients in the event of a product recall or safety concern related to a specific type of implant. ​

3. Ophthalmology

We have been working with a subject matter expert (ophthalmologist) to develop a number of SNOMED concepts related to eye disorders and eye care. Some of these concepts have been promoted to the SNOMED International Edition and some of them have been created in our national extension. The concepts are used in a commercial SNOMED-native application that is becoming widely used in New Zealand public and private practice.

4. Gambling harm intervention

New concepts and a reference set have been developed to support the collection and reporting of gambling harm intervention information to support a national gambling harm intervention programme.

5. Read to SNOMED mapping

Primary care practices in New Zealand continue to steadily migrate to SNOMED-based recordkeeping from Read codes. To support this process, we supply a Read to SNOMED mapping table (originally from the UK) in our national extension that is used by implementers. We have a 2030 target for primary care to be fully migrated to SNOMED and consequently for every New Zealander to have a SNOMED-coded primary health record.

We would like to know if other countries doing some work around primary care refset or any use of the GP/FP reference set. We are interested in this area.

6. CanShare

The CanShare team at the New Zealand Cancer Control Agency | Te Aho o Te Kahu continues to create SNOMED content to support systemic anticancer therapy, radiation oncology and ancillary studies data reporting, and national screening programmes and cancer registers.​

This has been a very busy SNOMED content development programme, although things are steadying now and there is some content refactoring.

We have promoted 24 new concepts and 1 new description to the SNOMED International Edition since April 2025.​

Interest from Sweden and Canada in content held in the New Zealand Edition has resulted in six of our concepts being promoted into the SNOMED International Edition.

443 new concepts and 2180 new description were added into NZ extension.

1 Like
11

NRC The Netherlands

Hospital diagnosis and procedures list - Ongoing content development. We have a large backlog of concepts in our extension from history choices. We don’t have the time to promote these thousands of concepts, but we get in trouble when we will exchange data in Europe - what to do with the extension concepts? Can we exchange them and how will that work?

Pathology structured report - The terminologist of PALGA is working on getting SNOMED in the Dutch structured reports. These reports are more detailed than ICCR templates. We have many concepts (>100) that actually need to be promoted to core.

Paramedics (physiotherapist, dietist, optometrist, occupational therapist etc) - These specialisms are starting SNOMED implementation and are starting reference set creation. This will lead to new concepts and some of them are using ICF, where we need a alignment with SNOMED.

Nursing - Starting SNOMED implementation. We are working on a solution where SNOMED and the nursing classifications can work together also using OpenEHR. Here also a reference set will be created - I’m trying to let that be a subset of the ICNP refset in SNOMED.

Patientfriendly terms - project has started to try to use AI for creating patientfriendly terms and descriptions.

Primary Care - Pilot is started to try to get ICPC-1 aligned with SNOMED as far as possible.

Content issues in general:

  • Dwarslaesies - this is a Dutch term with the meaning: A ‘dwarslaesie’ is a damage of the spinal cord. The cause can be traumatic or a bleeding, lesion or complication. It always leads to paralysis. It is spinal cord damage, but the spinal cord injury isn’t defined with damage and spinal cord lesion is not a child of spinal cord injury. We are struggling with this, what is the correct concept in SNOMED for this or should we make a new concept for this.
  • 272434008 |Anatomical relationship descriptor (qualifier value)| vs body structures. For the clinical building blocks we need part of the qualifiers as body structures.
1 Like
12

Norwegian NRC

Nutrition
The Norwegian NRC has engaged a clinical nutritionist to improve and further develop translations of content relating to the NCPT (Nutrition Care Process Terminology). We have already identified some areas that might require improvements/more content, and are also looking into harmonizing national nursing reference sets with the NCPT reference sets when it comes to nutrition related concepts

Mental health and behavioral disorders
Specialists in the psychiatry field in a region of Norway that uses SNOMED CT in their documentation have raised several cases of concepts that do not conform to the current coding practice nor clinical understanding of these types of disorders. We are not currently developing content in this area, but considering the new paradigm of psychiatric diagnoses that, among other things, ICD-11 will bring along, we need to evaluate how and if SNOMED CT can be of use for this clinical speciality

1 Like
13

Hi!
In Uruguay, during the last years, we have been working in the creation of a Laboratory National Catalogue- which we have just finished- using core concepts and creating unexisting laboratory procedures in our extension.
Nowadays we are working in a National Imaging Catalogue which could also imply creating some content in our extension.
Also, we have created or promoted some concepts needed for our National Drugs Dictionary.
Finally, we continue working in the qualifier hierarchy, creating health services in our extension to support our national ontology in the cases that is required.

1 Like
14

Sorry for the late post!
We have the following activities in Australia:

  • FHIR eRequesting - Building valueSets and terminology to support Pathology and Diagnostic Imaging. We haven’t created any Imaging content yet, as we know others are.
  • Allied Health Procedures/Findings - working with the Allied Health community identify and resolve content gaps.
  • National Health Service Directory - Creating content to support the service directory. Includes occupations and specialties.
  • Cannabis products
  • National Patient summary - aligned with FHIR IPS
  • FHIR Encounters
  • Surgical Procedures
    • Continue to support content requirement for our college Audit Log tool.
    • Bariatric Procedures - Collaboration with college to try clean up this content
    • Robotic Procedures
  • Content to support Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) and a few Social, emotional and wellbeing (SEWB) implementations.
  • “HMB project” - Work to address content gaps associated with menstruation disorders for alignment with FIGO classifcation.
1 Like
15

I can’t change my post, so some addition:

For paramedics als psychologist are involved and they ‘complain’ that DSM-V is not incorporated in SNOMED, or outdated and they need that in making their reference sets.

1 Like
16

Quick overview from Belgium,

  • Population screening content (HPV screening etc.)

  • Drug extension (however, mainly national content)

  • International Patient summary (patient problem lists)

  • Rare diseases

  • Medical images

  • Nursing registrations

  • Vaccines/allergy content

  • (Surgical) Procedures (ICHI)

  • Content to support Social Determinants of Health

  • ICF content

  • DSM content

  • Lab/pathology content

1 Like
December Meeting Agenda and Prep plus a National Content Question