1 Introduction

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.

The International Health Terminology Standards Development organisation (IHTSDO^®), trading as 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.

2 Background

This document provides a summarized description of the content changes included in the September 2021 Production release of the SNOMED Clinical Terms^® Managed Service Belgium Extension package.

It also includes technical notes detailing the known issues which have been identified (should any of these exist). These are content or technical issues where the root cause is understood, and the fix has been discussed and agreed, but has yet to be implemented.

This Belgium Extension package is dependent upon, and should therefore be consumed in conjunction with the SNOMED CT® July 2021 International Edition release.

2.1 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.

3 Content Development Activity

3.1 Summary

Content from the SNOMED CT® July 2021 International Edition release has been translated. 

This extension contains concepts, relationships and reference sets with their Dutch and French translations for healthcare professionals.

3.2 New and Updated Content

New Belgian content in this release:

New concepts

• 8 new COVID-19 related concepts representing the 4 approved COVID-19 vaccines in Belgium, covering the 4 suppliers and the 4 medicinal products

• 24 new concepts on General Practice and related to the GP reference set

New translated content

• For the GP language refset:

The concepts with new interface terms belong to the following hierarchies:

FRENCH

DUTCH

773 concepts have been added to the GP subset

• For the national language refset:

The new translations cover the following domains:

• 39 concepts related to COVID

• 4455 concepts related to the cardiovascular system

The concepts that were translated belong to the following hierarchies:

FRENCH

DUTCH

4 Technical notes

4.1 Known Issues

Known Issues are content or technical issues where the root cause is understood, and the resolution has been discussed and agreed but has yet to be implemented.  This can be due to a number of reasons, from lack of capacity within the current editing cycle, to the risk of impact to the stability of SNOMED CT if the fix were to be deployed at that stage in the Product lifecycle.  

For the SNOMED CT Managed Service - Belgium Extension Release, the following Known Issues were identified, and agreed to be resolved in the next editing cycle:

4.2 Technical notes

4.2.1  New ExtendedMap files

Please be aware that the following new files have been added to the Belgium Extension Release package, representing the new ICD-10 Extended Map being introduced in this editing cycle:

• der2_iisssccRefset_ExtendedMapDelta_BE1000172_20210915.txt

• der2_iisssccRefset_ExtendedMapSnapshot_BE1000172_20210915.txt

• der2_iisssccRefset_ExtendedMapFull_BE1000172_20210915.txt

The following folders have also been included in the Release package for the first time, in order to contain the new Extended Map files:

• ...Delta/Refset/Map/

• ...Snapshot/Refset/Map/

• ...Full/Refset/Map/

4.2.2  New Relationship Concrete Values files

Please be aware that the following new files have been added to the Belgium Extension Release package, representing the new Concrete Domains content being introduced in this editing cycle, in line with the related changes to the International Edition Release:

• xsct2_RelationshipConcreteValues_Delta_BE1000172_20210915.txt

• xsct2_RelationshipConcreteValues_Snapshot_BE1000172_20210915.txt

• xsct2_RelationshipConcreteValues_Full_BE1000172_20210915.txt