The main benefits of using an EHR accrue with the implementation of effective retrieval, analysis and reuse of clinical information. Analysis of health record data may cover:
- Individual patient records to search for significant patterns that may prompt interventions
- Patient groups or cohorts, based on demographics, diagnoses, treatments or interventions
- Enterprise groups, based on teams, wards, clinics, institutions or providers
- Geographical groups, based on a local area, town, region or country
SNOMED CT has a number of unique features, which makes it capable of supporting a range of retrieval and analytics functions, which use reference sets. Examples include, but are not limited to:
- Simple reference sets can be used to represent subsets of SNOMED CT concepts which can be used in queries to identify clinical records
- Simple reference sets can be used to represent non-standard aggregations of concepts for specific use cases
- Simple map reference sets, complex and extended map reference sets can be used to define maps from other code systems to SNOMED CT so that clinical data can be prepared for analytics, and then performed using SNOMED CT
- Simple reference sets and ordered reference sets can be used to define language or dialect specific sets of descriptions over which lexical searches can be performed
The document Data Analytics with SNOMED CT provides detailed information about how SNOMED CT can be used for analytics.
For more detailed use case examples, please refer to the following sections:
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