Evaluation of SNOMED coverage of Veterans Health Administration terms.
Veterans Health Administration (VHA) is now evaluating use of SNOMED-CT. This paper reports the first phase of this evaluation, which examines the coverage of SNOMED-CT for problem list entries. Clinician expressions in VA problem lists are quite diverse compared to the content of the current VA terminology Lexicon. We selected a random set of 5054 narratives that were previously "unresolved" against the Lexicon. These narratives were mapped to SNOMED-CT using two automated tools. Experts reviewed a subset of the tools' matched, partly matched, and un-matched narratives. The automated tools produced exact or partial matches for over 90% of the 5054 unresolved narratives. SNOMED-CT has promise as a coding system for clinical problems. In subsequent studies, VA will examine the coverage of SNOMED for other clinical domains, such as drugs, allergies, and physician orders.
Penz
Janet F E
JF
Veterans Administration Hospital and University of Utah Department of Medical Informatics, Salt Lake City, UT 84148, USA.
Brown
Steven H
SH
Carter
John S
JS
Elkin
Peter L
PL
Nguyen
Viet N
VN
Sims
Shannon A
SA
Lincoln
Michael J
MJ
D005568:Forms and Records Control; D006801:Humans; D016347:Medical Records Systems, Computerized / Q000145:classification* / Q000592:standards; D008501:Medical Records, Problem-Oriented; D039061:Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine; D014481:United States; D014493:United States Department of Veterans Affairs; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled