Methods and applications for visualization of SNOMED CT concept sets

Abstract

SummaryInconsistent use of SNOMED CT concepts may reduce comparability of information in health information systems. Terminology implementation should be approached by common strategies for navigating and selecting proper concepts. This study aims to explore ways of illustrating common pathways and ancestors of particular sets of concepts, to support consistent use of SNOMED CT and also assess potential applications for such visualizations. The open source prototype presented is an interactive web-based re-implementation of the terminology visualization tool TermViz that provides an overview of concepts and their hierarchical relations. It provides terminological features such as interactively rearranging graphs, fetching more concept nodes, highlighting least common parents and shared pathways in merged graphs etc. Four teams of three to four people used the prototype to complete a terminology mapping task and then, in focus group interviews, discussed the user experience and potential future tool usage. Potential purposes discussed included SNOMED CT search and training, consistent selection of concepts and content management. The evaluation indicated that the tool may be useful in many contexts especially if integrated with existing systems, and that the graph layout needs further tuning and development.

SNOMED CT Concept Hierarchies for Sharing Definitions of Clinical Conditions Using Electronic Health Record Data

“…In contrast to ICD, SNOMED CT is an ontology supporting multiple types of relationships between clinical concepts. 3 12 13 The subtype relationship (also known as an “is a” relationship) defines one concept as a subtype of another, more general, “parent” concept. This enables efficient classification of a clinical condition by including references to a SNOMED CT concept with all its hierarchical “children” and further descendant subtype concepts.…”

Improving Bridging from Informatics Theory to Practice

“…Four of the cited MIM articles were published between 1991 and 1999, six were published between 2000 and 2009 and eight were published between 2010 and 2013. The nine ACI articles that were influenced by theory published in MIM dealt with electronic health records [52,56], clinical documentation [53,58,59], SNOMED CT [57], medication-related decision support [54,60] computerized medication lists [55]. Most of the referenced MIM publications were related to the topic of evaluation.…”

“…Analysis of the references of each ACI publication published during 2014 except [11,16, 17] (N=70) revealed nine ACI articles [52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][60] citing eighteen articles from MIM [61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75][76][77][78]. Four of the cited MIM articles were published between 1991 and 1999, six were published between 2000 and 2009 and eight were published between 2010 and 2013.…”