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.

The SNOMED CT Switzerland Extension - packages these components for release every December and July, to be used with the latest SNOMED CT International Edition release.

The same content can be viewed online using the SNOMED CT browser.

Background

This document provides a summarized description of the content changes included in the December 2024 Production release of the SNOMED Clinical Terms^® Managed Service Switzerland Extension package.

It will also include 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 Switzerland Extension package is dependent upon, and should therefore be consumed in conjunction with, the SNOMED CT® November 2024 International Edition release.

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.

Content Development Activity

Summary

Content from the SNOMED CT®  2024 International Edition release has been included, alongside additional components for use in Switzerland. 

This extension contains concepts, relationships and reference sets for healthcare professionals. 

New and Updated Content

This release contains translations from the Common French Translation and Common German Translation.

Changes since the last release:

Description files (FR-CH)

• 0 new or updated records were added.

• 1 records were inactivated.

Language files (FR-CH)

• 0 new or updated records were added.

• 1 records were inactivated.

Description files (DE-CH)

• 6'322 new or updated records were added.

• 1'418 records were inactivated.

Language files (DE-CH)

• 6'406 new or updated records were added.

• 1'418 records were inactivated.

Description files (IT-CH)

• 5365 new or updated records were added.

• 0 records were inactivated.

Language files (IT-CH)

• 5365 new or updated records were added.

• 0 records were inactivated.

Technical notes

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 - Switzerland Extension Release, the following Known Issues were identified, and agreed to be resolved in the next editing cycle:

Resolved Issues

Resolved Issues are those where the resolution has been discussed and agreed, and has been implemented in time for this release. 

For the SNOMED CT Managed Service - Switzerland Extension Release, the following Issues were Resolved: 

Notice of changes to the CH Extension Release package

In line with the refined implementation of Annotations, we are updating all Extensions in order to align them with the updated version of the refsets in the International Edition Release package (which were first published in June 2024).

• The languageCode field was specified as the two characters of ISO|-639-1 code for the language of the annotation text. The change includes support for specifying dialect when it is applicable by adhering to RFC 5646, which allows the combination of two characters of ISO 639-1 code and two uppercase letters of country code (ISO 3166) separated by a hyphen.  The changes apply to both the Member Annotations String Value Reference Set + Component Annotation String Value reference set:

  • The column "languageCode" has therefore been changed to "languageDialectCode".

    • Component Annotations (1292992004)

      • OLD:    id    effectiveTime    active    moduleId    refsetId    referencedComponentId    languageCode    typeId    value

      • NEW:   id    effectiveTime    active    moduleId    refsetId    referencedComponentId    languageDialectCode    typeId    value

    • Member Annotations (1292995002)

      • OLD:   id    effectiveTime    active    moduleId    refsetId    referencedComponentId    referencedMemberId    languageCode    typeId    value

      • NEW:  id    effectiveTime    active    moduleId    refsetId    referencedComponentId    referencedMemberId    languageDialectCode    typeId    value