Approvals

Draft Amendment History

© International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation 2016.  All rights reserved.  SNOMED CT® was originally created by The College of American Pathologists.

This document forms part of the LOINC - SNOMED CT Cooperative Project Edition release of SNOMED CT® distributed by International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO), which is subject to IHTSDO’s SNOMED CT® Affiliate License, details of which may be found at http://www.ihtsdo.org/snomed-ct/get-snomed-ct/.

No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in any kind of retrieval system, except by an Affiliate of IHTSDO in accordance with the SNOMED CT® Affiliate License. Any modification of this document (including without limitation the removal or modification of this notice) is prohibited without the express written permission of IHTSDO.

Any copy of this document that is not obtained directly from IHTSDO [or a Member of IHTSDO] is not controlled by IHTSDO, and may have been modified and may be out of date. Any recipient of this document who has received it by other means is encouraged to obtain a copy directly from IHTSDO [or a Member of IHTSDO. Details of the Members of IHTSDO may be found at http://www.ihtsdo.org/members/].

This material contains content from LOINC® (http://loinc.org) that is used by permission from the Regenstrief Institute. The LOINC table, LOINC codes, and LOINC panels and forms file are copyright © 1995-2016, Regenstrief Institute, Inc. and the Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC) Committee and available in perpetuity at no cost under the license at http://loinc.org/terms-of-use.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction

1.1 Background

A cooperative agreement [3] was signed between the Regenstrief Institute and the IHTSDO in July 2013. The agreement details how SNOMED CT and LOINC will be linked through:

1. a map of LOINC Terms to post-coordinated SNOMED CT expressions

2. a map of LOINC Parts to SNOMED CT concepts

3. a map between LOINC Terms and existing pre-coordinated SNOMED CTconcepts

4. LOINC Answer sets mapped to SNOMED CT codes

5. addition of new content in either terminology

See Figure 1 for an illustration of these connections. The Alpha release includes artifacts related to items 1, 2, and 5 above. Note that this OWL file includes content for item 1 above (LOINC terms mapped to SNOMED CT expressions following the SNOMED CT Observables model).

Figure 1. Diagram showing an overview of maps, Expression Associations and content additions that form part of the Cooperative Works of the Agreement [3].

1.2 Purpose

This document is intended to give a brief description, background context and explanatory notes on the OWL file release associated with the LOINC - SNOMED CT Cooperative Project Alpha Release - phase 3.

This  OWL file version is for reviewing an ontology containing LOINC Terms defined by post-coordinated SNOMED CT expressions.

It is being released for additional input on content being developed for this project.

It should be opened with an ontology viewing/editing software such as Protege and classified with an ontology reasoner.

A hierarchy is created between some LOINC Terms after classification.

This is not an official release format for IHTSDO.

This file does not contain metadata such as refset identifier and correlation designation which are present in the official IHTSDO RF2 release files.

This is not a detailed technical document about the release file formats or on implementing LOINC and SNOMED CT together. See “Guidelines for using SNOMED CT and LOINC together - Phase 2 Draft” [1] for information about implementation of LOINC and SNOMED CT together.

All content will be released in parallel by IHTSDO and the Regenstrief Institute through their distribution channels, e.g. IHTSDO Confluence site, LOINC website.

Two other file formats are available for review of content in the Alpha release. Information about these files is provided in separate documents [2].

RF2 release format .txt files: these files are the official IHTSDO RF2 release files. This is the format intended to be continually distributed for implementation.

Excel spreadsheet: for reviewing the map of LOINC Terms to SNOMED CT expressions in a human-readable tabular format. This is not an official release format for IHTSDO. The map from LOINC Parts to SNOMED CT is not included as the Parts are not publicly released by the Regenstrief Institute.

1.3 Scope

This document is written for the purpose described above and is not intended to provide details of the technical specifications for SNOMED CT or encompass every change made during the release.

1.4 Audience

The audience includes National Release Centers, vendors of electronic health records, terminology developers and managers who wish to partake in the review of the LOINC - SNOMED CT Cooperative project edition Alpha release.