Introduction

Background

SNOMED CT terminology provides a common language that enables a consistent way of indexing, storing, retrieving, and aggregating clinical data across specialties and sites of care.

SNOMED International maintains the SNOMED CT technical design, the content architecture, the SNOMED CT content (includes the concepts table, the descriptions table, the relationships table, a history table, and ICD mappings), and related technical documentation.

Purpose

This document provides a summarized description of the content changes included in the July 2020 additional Rollup Delta package release of SNOMED Clinical Terms^® (SCT) International Release.

It also includes technical notes detailing the known content or technical issues where the root cause is understood, the fix has been discussed and agreed to, but has yet to be implemented.

The SNOMED International Release Notes are available alongside the July 2020 International Edition additional Rollup Delta package.

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.

Audience

The audience includes National Release Centers, WHO-FIC release centers, vendors of electronic health records, terminology developers and managers who wish to have an understanding of changes that have been incorporated into the July 2020 International Edition additional Rollup Delta package.  Those users who have downloaded and used the March 2020 Interim International Edition in their systems do not need to use this additional Rollup Delta package.

Format of this package

This package contains content in the DELTA files only - the Full and Snapshot files are all intentionally empty.  This is to prevent any confusion with the official, published International Edition Full and Snapshot files.

The Delta files contain all changes from the March 2020 Interim International Edition release plus the July 2020 International Edition release, with the original effectiveTimes as released in the published International Edition files.

Utilisation of this package

For those users who did NOT use the March 2020 Interim International Edition release in their systems, the advise on getting up to date is as follows:

1. The best option is to first apply the March 2020 Interim release Delta files (relative to the January 2020 release), and after that apply the official July 2020 Delta files (relative to the March 2020 Interim release).
   
   
   

2. If this is not feasible, then please use this July 2020 International Edition additional Rollup Delta package.

   1. If you use this package, then please be aware of the multiple effectiveTimes (per ComponentID) in the Delta files.   For example if a concept has been added in March 2020, and then inactivated in July 2020, both 20200309 activation record + 20200731 inactivation record will exist in the same Delta file for this rollup period.

   2. This is not an issue from an RF2 perspective, it simply needs to be accounted for in any upload or import routines used to consume the July 2020 International Edition additional Rollup Delta package.
      
      
      

3. Please take notice of (and use where required) the new machine readable .JSON metadata file included in the Rollup Delta package.  This will delineate the difference between the fact that the July 2020 release has Delta files relative to the March 2020 release, whereas this Delta Rollup package has Delta files relative all the way back to the January 2020 release (see details in the Technical Notes section below)

Content Development Activity

The July 2020 International Edition additional Rollup Delta package includes ALL changes (in DELTA files only) published across all packages released since January 2020, with the actual, official effectiveTime as at the time of publication.  In this particular case, this includes both the March 2020 Interim International Edition release, plus the July 2020 International Edition release.

Therefore, for example, all of the new Coronavirus content (from the March 2020 Interim International Release) would have an effectiveTime of 20200309, whilst the remainder of the content will have an effectiveTime of 20200731 as it will comprise changes from the July 2020 International Edition release.