December 15, 2007

IHTSDO SNOMED Clinical Terms Fundamentals

On July 22, 2010, the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organization (IHTSDO), based in Copenhagen, Denmark announced an arrangement with the World Health Organization (WHO) to harmonize WHO health care coding classifications for diseases and functioning with the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT), a standardized health terminology. The WHO classifications and SNOMED CT have both enabled health researchers to aggregate results from individual patient health records for health policy, health services management, and research uses. IHTSDO has anticipated that harmonizing the two systems will help to eliminate health care information gaps, to improve the accuracy, reliability, and quality of health and health care services, and help payers control health care costs.