Introduction

Audience for this document

This document should be read by all those (National Release Centers, WHO-FIC Collaborating Centers, vendors of electronic health records, terminology developers and managers) with an interest in the MRCM and its application. 

Release content

Overview

This package contains the SNOMED CT International Edition concept model represented using RF2 reference sets.

Effective date

All component states in the January 2017 SNOMED CT MRCM Refset Beta package have the value of effectiveTime field set to 20170131.  This denotes that the MRCM package is dependent upon, and should therefore be consumed in conjunction with the January 2017 SNOMED CT International Edition.

BETA Feedback date

All Beta feedback must be submitted by Friday 31st March 2017 at the very latest, however SNOEMD International would greatly appreciate all feedback to be provided as soon as it's found (and thereafter incrementally), in order that it can be investigated and resolved as early as possible within the release cycle.  Thank you very much for your cooperation.

Further Documentation

Technical Notes

Supporting content

In addition to the four new MRCM refsets, the Beta release package also contains various files (Concept, Description, etc) containing supporting content from the prospective July 2017 SNOMED CT International Edition.  These are provided in order to aid the consumption and analysis of the MRCM refsets, and should not be used for any other purpose.

This supporting content is provisional, and can not be considered final until July 31st 2017.  It should therefore not be used in any Production systems whatsoever, and should be used only in test systems to aid the evaluation of the MRCM refsets.

RF2 package format

The RF2 package convention dictates that it contains all relevant files, regardless of whether or not there is content to be included in each particular release.  Therefore, the package contains a mixture of files which contain both header rows and content data, and also files that are intentionally left blank (including only a header record).  The reason that these files are not removed from the package is to draw a clear distinction between:

1. Files that have been deprecated (and therefore removed from the package completely), due to the content no longer being relevant to RF2 in this or future releases, and 
2. Files that just happen to contain no data in this particular release (and are therefore included in the package but left blank, with only a header record), but are still relevant to RF2, and could therefore potentially contain data in future releases.

This allows users to easily distinguish between files that have purposefully been removed or not, as otherwise if files in option 2 above were left out of the package it could be interpreted as an error, rather than an intentional lack of content in that release.

Delta files

As per the current RF2 packaging standards, the Delta files remain empty for "first time" releases, due to the fact that there is no previous release package from which to derive the Delta's.  This means that in order to consume the Beta release, the recommended approach is to use the Snapshot files.  

For reference, the July 2017 International Edition will contain the first Production version of the MRCM refsets, and this package will have the Delta files populated with the new MRCM content (along with the Snapshot and Full files), as in this case we will derive the Delta's against the previous (January 2017) International Edition.