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 November 2022 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® September 2022 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® September 2022 International Edition release has been translated. 

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

3.2 New and Updated Content

New Belgian content in this release:

New concepts

No new concepts have been created in this release.

New reference sets

4 new subsets have been created containing concepts within 4 value sets corresponding to the Care Sets of AllergyIntolerance and Vaccination:

• AllergyIntolerance subsets

  • SubsetForAllergyIntoleranceCausativeAgentDrug

  • SubsetForAllergyIntoleranceCausativeAgentNondrug

  • SubsetForAllergyIntoleranceManifestation

• Vaccination

  • SubsetForVaccination

New translated content

Regarding the GP language refset:

• 1850 concepts have been added to the GP subset

The following table contains the total number of translations included in the GP subset:

DUTCH

FRENCH

Regarding the national language refset:

New translations have been introduced, both for concepts that didn't have a translation yet as for concepts with existing translations.

The following table contains the number of concepts with new translations:

DUTCH

FRENCH

The other changes are updates of existing content.

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

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

• der2_Refset_SubsetForAllergyIntoleranceCausativeAgentDrugSimpleRefsetSnapshot_BE1000172_20221115.txt

• der2_Refset_SubsetForAllergyIntoleranceCausativeAgentNondrugSimpleRefsetSnapshot_BE1000172_20221115.txt

• der2_Refset_SubsetForAllergyIntoleranceManifestationSimpleRefsetSnapshot_BE1000172_20221115.txt

• der2_Refset_SubsetForVaccinationSimpleRefsetSnapshot_BE1000172_20221115.txt

Please also be aware that as of the November 2022 Release of the BE Extension onwards, the RF2 package naming convention has been changed in order to bring it in line with the naming standards across all Managed Service products.  This is being changed from:

...to the following:

So, for the November 2022 BE Extension Release, for example, the RF2 package would have originally been called:

...whereas from now on it will instead be called:

4.3  Notice of changes to the International Edition Release Schedule