title: Evaluation of SNOMED coverage of Veterans Health Administration terms.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Veterans Administration Hospital and University of Utah Department of Medical Informatics, Salt Lake City, UT 84148, USA.
authors.forename: Janet F E
authors.initials: JF
authors.lastname: Penz
authors.forename: Steven H
authors.initials: SH
authors.lastname: Brown
authors.forename: John S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Carter
authors.forename: Peter L
authors.initials: PL
authors.lastname: Elkin
authors.forename: Viet N
authors.initials: VN
authors.lastname: Nguyen
authors.forename: Shannon A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Sims
authors.forename: Michael J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Lincoln
mesh_terms: 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