International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation

Last updated

International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation
AbbreviationIHTSDO
Formation2007
Type Nonprofit organization
Headquarters London, UK
Products SNOMED CT
Membership
35 member countries/territories
Website http://www.snomed.org/
RemarksTrading as SNOMED International

The International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO), trading as SNOMED International, is an international non-profit organization that owns SNOMED CT, a leading clinical terminology used in electronic health records. IHTSDO was founded in 2007 by 9 charter member countries (Australia, Canada, Denmark, Lithuania, Sweden, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States) in order to acquire the rights of SNOMED CT from the College of American Pathologists (CAP) and make the development of a global clinical language for healthcare an international, collaborative effort.

Contents

Governance

IHTSDO governance is defined in the IHTSDO Articles of Association. [1] The organization is headquartered in the United Kingdom (London).

Since 2007 the number of member countries has increased from 9 to 29. The members were (as of December 2016): [2] Australia, Belgium, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel, Lithuania, Malaysia, Malta, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States and Uruguay. The member countries provide the bulk of the institutional financing through payment of yearly member fees, which are based on gross national income. Members of IHTSDO can be either an agency of a national government or another body (such as a corporation or regional government agency) which has been endorsed by an appropriate national government authority within the country it represents. Member countries commit themselves to the dissemination of the IHTSDO terminologies within their jurisdiction, including where appropriate the creation of local translations, extensions, and mappings.[ citation needed ]

The general assembly (GA) is the organization's highest authority and is composed of representatives from all member countries with equal representation (although some member countries have not selected GA representatives and therefore are not represented in the GA). The GA is collectively charged with assuring that the purpose, objects and principles of the association are pursued and that the interests of IHTSDO are safeguarded. The GA appoints the management board (MB), which has overall responsibility for the management and direction of IHTSDO and has a duty to act in the best interests of the organization. The member countries are also represented by the member forum, which provides input on member priorities and helps develop the IHTSDO plan of work.[ citation needed ]

The organization is structured into four major areas: customer relations, operations, products & services, and strategy.

Seven advisory groups provide advice to the management team. In addition there are topic-specific project groups (PGs) and special interest groups (SIGs) which supplement and report to the standing committees. These groups are open and are not elected. IHTSDO PGs and SIGs include:

IHTSDO special interest groups (SIGs)IHTSDO project groups
AnesthesiaAnatomy Model
Concept ModelCollaborative Editing Roadmap
EducationContent Product Development Planning
IHTSDO Workbench DevelopersEvent, Condition and Episode Model
ImplementationFamily/General Practice Refset and ICPC Mapping
International Pathology & Laboratory Medicine IHTSDO Translation Tooling
MappingMachine & Human Readable Concept Model
NursingMapping SNOMED CT to ICD-10
PharmacyMigration
TranslationObservable and Investigation Model
Organism & Infectious Disease Model
Request Submission
Substance Hierarchy Redesign
Translation Quality Assessment

IHTSDO's work is documented on its website. The internal communication is supported by a Collaborative content management system.

Strategic Directions

The broad vision for IHTSDO is set out in their Articles of Association. [3] In 2015, the General Assembly and the management board agreed that the organization's focus for the subsequent 5 years would be (1) demonstrate successful large scale implementations of SNOMED CT (2) remove barriers to adoption for customers and stakeholders, (3) enable continuous development of our product to meet customer requirements, (4) provide scalable products and services that drive SNOMED CT adoption, and (5) set new trends and shape new technologies that increase the overall use of SNOMED CT. [4]

IHTSDO aims to achieve interoperability and harmonization between its terminology products and those standards produced by other international standards development organisations (SDOs). In support of this IHTSDO has negotiated a number of collaboration agreements with other SDOs, such as the World Health Organization, HL7, International Council of Nurses, [5] IEEE, [6] Regenstrief Institute & NPU, [7] openEHR, and WONCA.

Meetings

IHTSDO organizes periodic conferences. Generally within these conferences time is allocated to meetings of advisory groups, project groups and SIGs, to enable them to meet face to face. In addition there are meetings of the Member Forum and the Affiliate Forum. Advisory Groups, PGs and SIGs also communicate throughout the year via conference calls and manage messages and documents in a content management system (CMS).[ citation needed ]

Documentation

To support the implementation of SNOMED CT, a number of publications are produced by IHTSDO. These range from user guides to technical implementation guides as well as some educational materials and videos. Documents are available through the public website, but some items such as the videos can be found via YouTube. Member countries also contribute to the public domain and documents, which can often be found on individual member country websites; a link to these is provided on the IHTSDO webpages.[ citation needed ]

Office

The IHTSDO head office is located at 1 Kingdom Street, London, UK W6 6BD.

Related Research Articles

The ISO 9000 family is a set of five quality management systems (QMS) standards by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) that help organizations ensure they meet customer and other stakeholder needs within statutory and regulatory requirements related to a product or service. ISO 9000 deals with the fundamentals of QMS, including the seven quality management principles that underlie the family of standards. ISO 9001 deals with the requirements that organizations wishing to meet the standard must fulfill. ISO 9002 is a model for quality assurance in production and installation. ISO 9003 for quality assurance in final inspection and test. ISO 9004 gives guidance on achieving sustained organizational success.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">United States National Library of Medicine</span> Worlds largest medical library

The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), operated by the United States federal government, is the world's largest medical library.

A standards organization, standards body, standards developing organization (SDO), or standards setting organization (SSO) is an organization whose primary function is developing, coordinating, promulgating, revising, amending, reissuing, interpreting, or otherwise contributing to the usefulness of technical standards to those who employ them. Such an organization works to create uniformity across producers, consumers, government agencies, and other relevant parties regarding terminology, product specifications, protocols, and more. Its goals could include ensuring that Company A's external hard drive works on Company B's computer, an individual's blood pressure measures the same with Company C's sphygmomanometer as it does with Company D's, or that all shirts that should not be ironed have the same icon on the label.

A medical classification is used to transform descriptions of medical diagnoses or procedures into standardized statistical code in a process known as clinical coding. Diagnosis classifications list diagnosis codes, which are used to track diseases and other health conditions, inclusive of chronic diseases such as diabetes mellitus and heart disease, and infectious diseases such as norovirus, the flu, and athlete's foot. Procedure classifications list procedure code, which are used to capture interventional data. These diagnosis and procedure codes are used by health care providers, government health programs, private health insurance companies, workers' compensation carriers, software developers, and others for a variety of applications in medicine, public health and medical informatics, including:

A subscription-based product of the International Council for Harmonisation of Technical Requirements for Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH), MedDRA or Medical Dictionary for Regulatory Activities is a clinically validated international medical terminology dictionary-thesaurus used by regulatory authorities and the biopharmaceutical industry during the regulatory process, from pre-marketing to post-marketing activities, and for safety information data entry, retrieval, evaluation, and presentation. Also, it is the adverse event classification dictionary.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Basel Committee on Banking Supervision</span> International financial regulatory body

The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) is a committee of banking supervisory authorities that was established by the central bank governors of the Group of Ten (G10) countries in 1974. The committee expanded its membership in 2009 and then again in 2014. As of 2019, the BCBS has 45 members from 28 jurisdictions, consisting of central banks and authorities with responsibility of banking regulation.

The InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS),, is an ANSI-accredited standards development organization composed of Information technology developers. It was formerly known as the X3 and NCITS.

The Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED) is a systematic, computer-processable collection of medical terms, in human and veterinary medicine, to provide codes, terms, synonyms and definitions which cover anatomy, diseases, findings, procedures, microorganisms, substances, etc. It allows a consistent way to index, store, retrieve, and aggregate medical data across specialties and sites of care. Although now international, SNOMED was started in the U.S. by the College of American Pathologists (CAP) in 1973 and revised into the 1990s. In 2002 CAP's SNOMED Reference Terminology was merged with, and expanded by, the National Health Service's Clinical Terms Version 3 to produce SNOMED CT.

The International Classification of Health Interventions (ICHI) is a system of classifying procedure codes being developed by the World Health Organization (WHO). It is currently available as a beta 3 release. The components for clinical documentation are stable. The component on public health interventions is in the process of being finalized. Updates on development and status of the classification are listed on WHO home page.

Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC) is a database and universal standard for identifying medical laboratory observations. First developed in 1994, it was created and is maintained by the Regenstrief Institute, a US nonprofit medical research organization. LOINC was created in response to the demand for an electronic clinical care and management database and is publicly available at no cost.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SNOMED CT</span> System for medical classification

SNOMED CT or SNOMED Clinical Terms is a systematically organized computer-processable collection of medical terms providing codes, terms, synonyms and definitions used in clinical documentation and reporting. SNOMED CT is considered to be the most comprehensive, multilingual clinical healthcare terminology in the world. The primary purpose of SNOMED CT is to encode the meanings that are used in health information and to support the effective clinical recording of data with the aim of improving patient care. SNOMED CT provides the core general terminology for electronic health records. SNOMED CT comprehensive coverage includes: clinical findings, symptoms, diagnoses, procedures, body structures, organisms and other etiologies, substances, pharmaceuticals, devices and specimens.

The Clinical Data Interchange Standards Consortium (CDISC) is a standards developing organization (SDO) dealing with medical research data linked with healthcare, to "enable information system interoperability to improve medical research and related areas of healthcare". The standards support medical research from protocol through analysis and reporting of results and have been shown to decrease resources needed by 60% overall and 70–90% in the start-up stages when they are implemented at the beginning of the research process.

The Standards Council of Canada (SCC) (French: Conseil canadien des normes (CCN)) is a Canadian organization with the mandate to promote voluntary standardization in Canada. The SCC is responsible for:

Medcin, is a system of standardized medical terminology, a proprietary medical vocabulary and was developed by Medicomp Systems, Inc. MEDCIN is a point-of-care terminology, intended for use in Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems, and it includes over 280,000 clinical data elements encompassing symptoms, history, physical examination, tests, diagnoses and therapy. This clinical vocabulary contains over 38 years of research and development as well as the capability to cross map to leading codification systems such as SNOMED CT, CPT, ICD-9-CM/ICD-10-CM, DSM, LOINC, CDT, CVX, and the Clinical Care Classification (CCC) System for nursing and allied health.

Transport standards organisations is an article transport Standards organisations, consortia and groups that are involved in producing and maintaining standards that are relevant to the global transport technology, transport journey planning and transport ticket/retailing industry. Transport systems are inherently distributed systems with complex information requirements. Robust modern standards for transport data are important for the safe and efficient operation of transport systems. These include:

Global Medical Device Nomenclature (GMDN) is a system of internationally agreed generic descriptors used to identify all medical device products. This nomenclature is a naming system for products which include those used for the diagnosis, prevention, monitoring, treatment or alleviation of disease or injury in humans.

Read codes are a clinical terminology system that was in widespread use in General Practice in the United Kingdom until around 2018, when NHS England switched to using SNOMED CT. Read codes are still in use in Scotland and in England were permitted for use in NHS secondary care settings, such as dentistry and mental health care until 31 March 2020. Read codes support detailed clinical encoding of multiple patient phenomena including: occupation; social circumstances; ethnicity and religion; clinical signs, symptoms and observations; laboratory tests and results; diagnoses; diagnostic, therapeutic or surgical procedures performed; and a variety of administrative items. It therefore includes but goes significantly beyond the expressivity of a diagnosis coding system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">British Academy of Management</span> Learned society

The British Academy of Management (BAM), founded in 1986, is a learned society dedicated to advancing the academic discipline of management in the United Kingdom. It is a member of the Academy of Social Sciences. The academy runs two peer-reviewed academic journals: the British Journal of Management and the International Journal of Management Reviews. The headquarters of the British Academy of Management is in London, United Kingdom.

Health Level Seven International (HL7) is a non-profit ANSI-accredited standards development organization that develops standards that provide for global health data interoperability.

NPU terminology is a patient centered clinical laboratory terminology for use in the clinical laboratory sciences. Its function is to enable results of clinical laboratory examinations to be used safely across technology, time and geography. To achieve this, the NPU terminology supplies:

References

  1. IHTSDO articles of association
  2. IHTSDO members
  3. IHTSDO Articles of Association
  4. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 6 March 2016. Retrieved 7 March 2016.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  5. "Partnerships - ICN". www.ihtsdo.org. Retrieved 21 December 2016.
  6. "IEEE and IHTSDO Sign Memorandum of Understanding | Business Wire". www.businesswire.com. Retrieved 21 December 2016.
  7. "NPU". Archived from the original on 29 June 2011. Retrieved 9 October 2011.