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As was announced at the London Business Meeting this past April, the Global Patient Set (GPS) has been released today. Along with today's linked press release, below is additional information on the GPS to support your knowledge and share among your colleagues and networks. 

SNOMED International has introduced the GPS to support health information interoperability across care settings, systems, organizations and national borders without the need for a SNOMED CT affiliate license. The GPS is being made available at no cost to users with the intention to release it annually.


The GPS, as a whole, is not a clinically curated list. Further, the GPS also excludes SNOMED CT’s inherent relationships and hierarchies; fundamental to the nature of an ontology and its ability to enable clinical data analytics, decision support, and power artificial intelligence, etc.  The complete set of concept synonyms and definitions are also not part of the GPS. 


What is the GPS? The GPS is a managed list of:

  • Existing SNOMED CT unique identifiers

  • Fully specified names (FSN)

  • Preferred terms in international English, and

  • Active/inactive flags


The scope of the GPS contains concepts from SNOMED CT refsets to support the following domains and potential uses:


The GPS (specifically the set of materials included in the GPS tab-separated values file) is produced by SNOMED International under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Four scenarios, or use cases, have also been developed which explore how the GPS may be used in different contexts. The scenarios have been framed to tell a few GPS stories: Easing clinical transitions, enhancing digital maturity, supporting global interoperability and lastly, use in other contexts, including software and specification development. These are available in full in the implementation guide as well as a high level scenario summary document.


Please contact gps@snomed.org with your questions and feedback or visit the GPS Information page for additional resources.

GPS Resources:

A number of resources have been developed to support the launch and subsequent use of the GPS:

  • GPS Information Page - The source for all information related to the GPS.

  • Registration Minisite - The site where users provide their contact information to register their use of the GPS. A download of the GPS file is then initiated.  

  • Implementation Guide - The implementation guide addresses terms and conditions, contents and use of the GPS.

  • GPS Scenarios - A document with summary GPS scenario, or use case, stories. These link to the implementation guide which contain the full scenarios.   

  • Frequently Asked Questions - Provides answers to some of the expected questions about the GPS. As more questions are received, we can add these to the existing collection. 

Please contact gps@snomed.org with your questions and feedback or visit the GPS Information page.

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  1. Does this allow the no member country members to translate the fully specified name and preferred terms into another language? Or they can only use mapping from their own language term set?

    for example, can they use 

    38341003 |  高血压疾病,全身动脉(疾病)| or 38341003 | Trastorno hipertensivo, arterial sistémico (trastorno) | instead of 38341003 | Hypertensive disorder, systemic arterial (disorder) | in their system directly?