It Seems Some Are Having Some Nice Trips Overseas - But It Is Not Clear To Me Just What Value We Are Getting.

This appeared last week:

IHTSDO Conference Report October 2014

Created on Friday, 23 January 2015

The IHTSDO Conference Report October 2014 Meeting has been published.

The International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO) Business Meeting Report provides summary information on the international activities and areas of work as discussed at the IHTSDO October 2014 Business Meeting held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. The report includes an update from the Content, Implementation & Education, Quality Assurance, and Technical Committees, as well as the General Assembly and Member Forum.

Download IHTSDO Conference Report October 2014 PDF (145.41 KB)

Here is the link:

http://www.nehta.gov.au/media-centre/nehta-publications/759-ihtsdo-conference-report-october-2014

To understand what the meeting covered here is the Executive Summary.

2 Executive summary

2.1 Member Forum

• The IHTSDO is continuing its transition into a services-based organisation, focussed on customer relationships.

• Future collaborations to include:

o HL7, regarding value sets to bind SNOMED CT;

o the Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale (INSERM) with Orphanet;

o the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC);

o the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC); and

o the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) and the RadLex vocabulary.

• Proposed licencing changes, focussing on non-member activity, and changes to member licence-reporting requirements (i.e. how members need to track and report on the affiliated licence holders).

• Future meetings shall involve two annual face-to-face meetings, with additional quarterly online meetings based on regional – or topic-specific – agendas.

• Aggressive efforts are planned for the IHTSDO, centred on:

o content authoring projects, for 2015 delivery;

o the replacement of existing authoring tooling, for 2015 delivery; and

o the promotion of “SNOMED CT Factory”, involving a move to the continuous delivery of SNOMED CT resources, with a concurrent reengineering of processes, as required.

• The launch of online SNOMED CT Foundation education courses and certification in early 2015, with online SNOMED CT Advanced courses to follow.

• The Standing Committee review is likely to result in future revisions resulting in a more advisory role, and eliminating the creation or running of work items by the committees themselves.

• The UK Terminology Centre (UKTC) is to develop work relating to blood products, including links back to other IHTSDO members, via the MemberForum.

2.2 Content Committee

• The IHTSDO is actively improving its workflow and terminology-related deliverables, with a greater emphasis on specific focus groups and agreed deadlines, encouraging faster response-times and turnaround on requests.

• The SNOMED CT release for 2016 will include a greater proportion of new content than any previous release, with additions to devices, organisms, and dermatology, among others.

• The need for an approach to the modelling of genetic procedures, and of the gene taxon itself, was identified as a gap in SNOMED CT.

2.3 Implementation and Education Committee

• In 2014, the committee successfully developed the E-Learning Center and created new resources.

• The 2015 work plan is focussed on developing and conducting a series of E-Learning courses.

• Several guide and specification documents are being developed, and are either at the review stage or have been published.

• A “Vendor Introduction to SNOMED CT” has been developed and is out for internal review.

• The Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC) and SNOMED CT mapping project is progressing with a technology preview being released in October 2014, and a second preview scheduled for March 2015.

2.4 Quality Assurance Committee

• The Critical Incident Policy has finished development and has been forwarded to the IHTSDO management team for consideration. However, the committee recognises it requires ongoing development to expand and improve its coverage for the types of incidents covered.

• The committee will be collaborating more closely with the others to improve their alignment with the Quality Assurance Framework (QAF), and assist in the production of suitable quality reports.

2.5 Technical Committee

• A committee subgroup was formed to analyse the expansion of the expressivity of SNOMED CT’s description logic, and to promote SNOMED CT’s representation in Web Ontology Language (OWL). The subgroup is to be co-chaired by Brian Carlsen (USA) and Dion McMurtrie (NEHTA), and membership is to include Michael Lawley from the Australian e-Health Research Centre (AEHRC).

• Standards work relating to the Concrete Domain Specification is to be driven by the new SNOMED CT description logic subgroup of the Technical Committee, as part of other possible expansions to the expressivity of SNOMED CT’s description logic.

• A proposal is to be drafted by the Technical Committee for the Member Forum to seek endorsement for a completely automated Release Format 1 (RF1) conversion of Release Format 2 (RF2) that – although not completely populating RF1 faithfully – meets all requirements, nonetheless. This will reduce the burden on the IHTSDO of producing RF1 releases.

• More work is required on the definition of semantics for the SNOMED CT family of languages. To date, work has been on the syntactic definition.

• A proposal was mooted for the IHTSDO to produce and provide small samples of RF2 data with predefined patterns of valid and invalid data for software testing.

• The committee supported the idea of reworking the Developers’ toolkit with updated technologies and techniques, rather than dropping it completely.

• The committee will form a subgroup to analyse open source project governance and contribution models, and provide analysis and recommendations for Rory Davidson (Head of Applications & Architecture, IHTSDO) to formalise the IHTSDO’s Open Tooling Framework (OTF) processes.

----- End Summary

What I am left wondering with all this is just where the value of this work is trickling down to the e-Health Community in Australia and just how ready for ‘prime time’ SNOMED actually is.

To date I have to say the practical impacts seem to be rather thin on the ground. Please let me know if you or your application are using SNOMED to make a real, on the ground, difference. I would really like to know we are getting value for all this effort.

David.