Introduction

The SNOMED CT terminology provides a common language that enables a consistent way of indexing, storing, retrieving, and aggregating clinical data across specialties and sites of care. The International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO^®) maintains the SNOMED CT technical design, the content architecture, the SNOMED CT content (including the concepts table, the descriptions table, the relationships table, a history table and ICD mappings), and related technical documentation. 

This document is intended to give a brief description, background context, explanatory notes on the SNOMED CT International MedDRA project and the resulting Release package, which is now published annually. This document covers the background to the collaboration between SNOMED International and ICH and goes on to cover the consequent release artefacts. It is not a detailed technical document of SNOMED CT, MedDRA or the SNOMED CT International MedDRA release. Nor does it seek to provide an editorial policy for this content.

This ALPHA release package is distributed for evaluation purposes only.  It must not be used in production clinical systems or in clinical settings, or distributed to Affiliate Licensees or any third parties.   

Audience for this document

This document should be read by all those (National Release Centers, vendors of electronic health records, terminology developers and regulators) with an interest in the usage of this content in SNOMED CT and its linkage with MedDRA. 

Background

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Scope and Purpose of the collaborative work

The scope of the SNOMED CT International MedDRA project was the delivery of a concept model to support MedDRA content within SNOMED CT, and the continuous alignment of SNOMED CT with MedDRA.  This was managed in phases, and we are now in the business as usual (maintenance) phase.   

Under the terms of the Cooperation agreement between the IHTSDO and the ICH, .......................................

Release content

Overview

The MedDRA derivative content is released under a project-specific module (XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX) with component identifiers that are within the main IHTSDO (International Release) namespace. The content links into the main XXXXXXXXXX hierarchy, and therefore all the fully specified names have a ("XXXXXXXXXXXXX") semantic tag. All the concepts are primitive i.e. no modeling beyond the subtype relationships, and the hierarchical organisation is based on existing MedDRA groupings ('collective terms'). 

Content detail

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Language preferences

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Dependent Content

The content in the January 2020 SNOMED CT MedDRA Map package has been updated in line with updates received from MedDRA from their XXXXXXXXXXXXX version.  The January 2019 SNOMED CT International Edition has been selected as the baseline for the January 2020 SNOMED CT MedDRA Map package, and therefore all filenames and record have been assigned the value of 20190131 in the effectiveTime field. 

Technical Notes

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.