1 Introduction

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^®), trading as SNOMED International, maintains the SNOMED CT technical design, the content architecture, the SNOMED CT content (includes the concepts table, the descriptions table, the relationships table, a history table, and ICD mappings), and related technical documentation.

2 Background

This document provides a summarized description of the content changes included in the March 2020 Production release of the SNOMED Clinical Terms^® Managed Service Belgium Extension package.

It will also includes technical notes detailing the known issues which have been identified (should any of these exist). These are content or technical issues where the root cause is understood, and the fix has been discussed and agreed, but has yet to be implemented.

This Belgium Extension package is dependent upon, and should therefore be consumed in conjunction with the SNOMED CT® January 2020 International Edition release.

2.1 Scope

This document is written for the purpose described above and is not intended to provide details of the technical specifications for SNOMED CT or encompass every change made during the release.

3 Content Development Activity

3.1 Summary

Content from the SNOMED CT® January 2020 International Edition release has been translated. 

This extension contains concepts, relationships and reference sets with their Dutch and French translations for healthcare professionals.

3.2 New and Updated Content

New Belgian content in this release:

The extension contains for the first time 3 "reference sets"; these are simple reference sets for translated plant materials, animal materials and edible substances.

Another 7015 Another XXXXXXXX concepts were translated in French and Dutch.

The concepts that were translated belong to the following hierarchies:

FRENCH

DUTCH

4 Technical notes

4.1 Known Issues

Known Issues are content or technical issues where the root cause is understood, and the resolution has been discussed and agreed but has yet to be implemented.  This can be due to a number of reasons, from lack of capacity within the current editing cycle, to the risk of impact to the stability of SNOMED CT if the fix were to be deployed at that stage in the Product lifecycle.  

For the SNOMED CT Managed Service - Belgium Extension Release, the following Known Issues were identified, and agreed to be resolved in the next editing cycle:

4.2 Technical notes

Please find some additional information about two files that have been made available since September 2018:

The file "sct2_Relationship_Full/Snapshot/Delta_BE1000172_20190915" contains some unwanted additional records. We will fix this issue together with Snomed International for the release of March 2020. Until that moment we ask you to not use this file. It is not necessary to use it since Belgium doesn’t have any concepts of its own that can be used in an eHR (EPD/DPI) at this moment.

The file "der2_cRefset_AttributeValueDelta_BE1000172_20190915.txt" is a kind of “audit log” containing the description (in Dutch and French) of concepts that have been inactivated. These “metadata” are not necessary for using the Belgian extension. At this moment the file contains descriptions of all concepts that have been activated during the last 2 years. In the future this file will be updated with concepts that have been activated during the past 6 months. Remark: the descriptions themselves are not inactivated; they are necessary to read concepts that were active in the past. The unwanted additional records (since September 2018) in the file with the inferred relationships are removed.