2026-04-15 - CMAG Meeting

Welcome

@Sarah Lukha

2 mins

• Attendees list

• Introductions 

• Note:

  • The meeting will be recorded for the purpose of creating minutes. The recording of meeting will be available online until minutes approved. Once approved the recording will be deleted. Will follow SI’s Recordings Policy.

  • Joining the meeting by accepting the Zoom prompt declares that you have no objection to your comments being recorded.

  • AI enabled summaries have also been activated and are required as a course of SNOMED International business. All summaries will be de-identified in terms of inclusion in post event reports.

Administration

   @Sarah Lukha

5 mins

• Apologies

• Declarations of Interest - nil

• February 2026 Meeting Minutes - accepted

• Action items from last meeting

Lateralised imaging extension content 

   @Sarah Lukha

5-10 mins

• CMAG Lateralised Imaging Subproject

• Status:

  • @Maria Braithwaitewill be the Senior Terminologist managing this work.

  • Please don’t update the descriptions and/or model, Maria will make changes to align with the international editorial guide at the time of promotion.

  • Completion date now passed (Q1 2026) - continue with progress made to date.

  • Norway, Canada, Uruguay – ready to promote.

  • Netherlands content - ready to promote.

  • Graeme Elsby (GE) requested extension of the deadline by a couple of weeks so UK can complete this work - Monica Harry (MH) agreed that this would be acceptable.

  • Question: are group members aware of any content they have added that has not been included in these spreadsheets (since June 2025)? Andrew Perry (AP) advised there had been changes to the UK content since the reports were run (inactivations/description and modelling changes).

Content tracker update

   @Sarah Lukha

5-10mins

CMAG Content Tracker Prioritisation SubprojectPreview

• Current status:

  • Completion date now passed (Q1 2026) - continue with progress made to date (110 trackers reviewed)

  • Partially complete rows will have unfilled rows set to ‘low priority’.

  • Next steps: review by Member Forum

  • Update to be given at June meeting.

  • The top 5 high priority tickets that require expertise for completion require subject matter expertise in the following areas: immunology & vaccinations, safeguarding (assault vs abuse vs violence), cardiologist & respiratory physician (<x> failure and <x>insufficiency), diabetes, neurologist (paralysis, palsy, paresis). No SMEs were identified during the meeting.

  • GE confirmed UK would not be completing this work.

  • For the incomplete rows: Matt Cordell (MC) would add in rankings for any incomplete rows for Australia. No objections to marking incomplete rows as 'low priority'.

  • Jim Case (JC) confirmed the 'top tier' of highest priority content trackers would be taken to the Member Forum for further review and prioritisation.

  • Feikje Hielkema (FH) raised a closed organism tracker that she suggests could be completed. FH will provide a list of organism concepts to be included. https://projects.jira.snomed.org/browse/IHTSDO-1173

  • Question: can group members offer clinical expertise in these areas? No SMEs suggested by group.

• https://forums.snomed.org/t/open-content-trackers-discussion-topic/744

Microbiology and Antibiotic Susceptibility

Maël Le Gall and Xavier Gansel

30 mins

• Microbiology project group planning to restart.

• Maël Le Gall (MLG) and Xavier Gansel (XG) confirmed they were satisfied with bacterial morphologies being added as findings rather than being incorporated into the organism hierarchy as a good first step for this work. JC discussed that qualifier values to represent morphology would need to be created to define this finding content (to be used as a value for Has Interpretation attribute).

• Group discussed the large amount of work required to review all organism concepts if morphology concepts were added to the organism hierarchy.

• For legacy morphology organism concepts, a community consultation would be required regarding the 2 ways that morphology is being represented (finding vs organism) prior to any proposal to represent ‘shape-only’ organism concepts solely in the findings hierarchy. Important to assess impact on current implementations. MC also raised the impact this would have on analytics e.g. searching for all gram-negative organisms.

• JC advised references would be required which demonstrate requested terms are recognised in authoritative sources.

National Content Development Activities

Group

30 mins

• Discussions summarised information collected in this SNOMED Forums post:https://forums.snomed.org/t/national-content-development-updates-for-the-april-2026-meeting/1082

• JC clarified with Stuart Abbot (SA) that for any genomics content, the UK plan was to submit to SI rather than authoring it in the UK extension.

• Potential for the Netherlands to provide access to Neurology SME for SI content tracker work as they are also working on content in this area.

Gravity racism concepts

@Sarah Lukha for @Cathy Richardson

20mins

•  SNOMED Forums post

• 14 concepts

Discussion points:

• Query about need for “perceived” racism. Support for the fact that racism is how the patient “perceives it”.

• Wording may suggest that the healthcare profession doesn’t agree there is racism. The terms may imply that the racism may/may not be true - the perception of racism rather than acknowledging any truth. John Snyder (JS) clarified that the use case for these concepts would be that they are assigned prior to a formal assessment of racism taking place.

• Needs to be clear about who is being racist (patient or by healthcare provider).

• Further definition for “respectful care” may be useful e.g. for translation.

• These may act as a format for further similar concepts covering ageism, sexism etc to be added in the future.

• General understanding that this is a difficult area, understanding for why descriptions are written as they are and why they are needed.

'Lateral’ Content Duplication From Extension to Extension

@Sarah Lukha

20mins

• New customer CRS guidance is currently being drafted relating to ‘Lateral’ Content Duplication From Extension to Extension

  Often referred to as ‘Lateral promotion’.

• We will contact the owning extensions in the next few weeks to advise that we will promote the content to the international edition where appropriate

Feedback from group:

• Some preference to create a new concept in extension rather than ‘lateral’ content duplication from extension to extension unless a specific interoperability use case is identified.

The concept will be promoted from the originating extension which will also have the earliest effective time. The concept ID will be the same in both of the extensions it is currently published in.

The SI ‘Lateral’ Content Duplication From Extension to Extension report will be added to these meeting minutes once internal review work has been completed.

National Content Forum

Group

5mins

• Standing agenda item

• https://forums.snomed.org/t/cmag-national-content-questions/363/3

• Group to post content queries either on this dedicated post or directly on the CMAG Forums page.

Briefing note reminders

@Sarah Lukha

5mins

• SNOMED Forums Briefing Notes page

1. Changes to Obesity and Central Obesity

   1. Informational only. Planned modelling updates to obesity and central obesity concepts (91 concepts). Concept inactivation (840358001 |High body weight (finding)|) and hierarchy and synonym review.

2. MF Only Transition plan to increase Description Type Length Limits (posted 9th April)

   • Most descriptions will stay well under 255 characters — no change for the vast majority.

   • The planned expansion of certain International Edition descriptions to ~330 characters has been delayed pending further analysis, and will be included in a later release.

   • The only July 2026 International release change will be raising the Description Length Limit from 255 to 4096 characters, via an update to the `descriptionLength` fields in the DescriptionType files.

3. MF Only Summary of the proposal for MF Onboarding Resources (13 April)

Forum Posts

Group

20mins

Forum post: Editorial guidelines and implementation requirements (Australia and Norway commented).

• Question: have the points raised impacted other Members as well?

Feedback from group:

• CMAG meetings may be a useful route to bring appeals of content the may have been rejected by SI to see if there is support for content by other countries. Members want to avoid duplication of work where a concept is required in multiple countries.

• Some preference for SI Editorial Guidelines to be more on the stricter side in terms of adding content.

• With heavily pre-coordinated content, there may be other ways of collecting this information rather the pre-coordination.

Future work items

5mins

• Question: do group members have any future work projects to suggest? None raised during the meeting.

Other business

Group

5mins

Additional question received from Taleya Girvan (TG) via Zoom chat but not addressed during the meeting : For national extensions that use Simplex, is there a tool (maybe similar to the Translation Tool) where if we see a concept in another national extension that we kind of import and ADAPT (maybe add synonyms)?

Simplex lacks a dedicated tool for importing and adapting concepts from other national extensions. Instead, the standard workflow is to request the concept’s promotion to the International Edition through the Content Request Service, which eventually makes it available for you to add local synonyms.

Next meeting

@Sarah Lukha

5mins

• Tuesday 23rd June?

• Wednesday 24th June?