concept enumeration

Concept enumeration serves the same purpose as more general approaches to providing enumerated lists of values (i.e. assigning a number to a value). However, the use of SNOMED CT concept identifier allows access to the human readable meaning of each enumeration using descriptions in the same way for other concepts.
The SNOMED CT concepts used to represent concept enumerations are usually subtype children (or descendants) of concepts in the SNOMED CT metadata hierarchy. Each possible value is represented by a single child concept. This allows updates to the permitted values to be tracked using the component history mechanism.