Introduction

Background

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.

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.

Purpose

This document provides a summarized description of the content changes included in the July 2020 additional Rollup Delta package release of SNOMED Clinical Terms^® (SCT) International Release.

It also includes technical notes detailing the known content or technical issues where the root cause is understood, the fix has been discussed and agreed to, but has yet to be implemented.

The SNOMED International Release Notes are available alongside the July 2020 International Edition additional Rollup Delta package.

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.

Audience

The audience includes National Release Centers, WHO-FIC release centers, vendors of electronic health records, terminology developers and managers who wish to have an understanding of changes that have been incorporated into the July 2020 International Edition additional Rollup Delta package.

Content Development Activity

The July 2020 International Edition additional Rollup Delta package includes ALL changes published across all packages released since January 2020, with the actual, official effectiveTime as at the time of publication.  In this particular case, this includes both the March 2020 Interim International Edition release, plus the July 2020 International Edition release.

Therefore, for example, all of the new Coronavirus content (from the March 2020 Interim International Release) would have an effectiveTime of 20200309. 

The rest of the content will have an effectiveTime of 20200731, as it will comprise changes from the July 2020 International Edition release.

Technical notes

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.  

Please see the relevant Release Notes (listed above) for all Known Issues identified across both Releases.

Resolved Issues

Resolved issues are Known Issues which were not fixed as part of the previous release lifecycle, but which have now been resolved in the latest release.  They can also be issues found during the Alpha and Beta testing of the current release, which were resolved before the final deployment of the associated Member release.  Finally they can be issues which were reported or found during the testing phase, but which have been closed without any action taken.  

Please see the relevant Release Notes (listed above) for all Issues Resolved across both Releases.

Technical updates

RF2 package format

For future reference, 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 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 
• 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.

New Configuration file in the RF2 package, containing Release Metadata 

A new file will be included in the July 2020 International Edition (and all subsequent releases), containing metadata about the Release package itself.  This has been created in conjunction with feedback from the community, and as such will initially contain the following fields:

• effectiveTime
  
• deltaFromDate
  
• deltaToDate
  
• languageRefset(s)
  
• humanReadableLanguageRefset(s)
  
• licenceStatement
  

The file will be in .JSON format, to ensure that it is both machine-readable and human-readable.  It will be named "release_package_information.json".

The metadata will be extended and refined going forward, in order to ensure that it contains the most useful information possible. If anyone has any ideas about any other useful information to include, please send them to info@snomed.org, along with a business case explaining how the information would benefit stakeholders.  Please be aware that this use case will then be assessed by SNOMED International, and the new metadata will only be included in the configuration file if the business case is strong enough.  

Early visibility of impending change in the July 2020 International edition

Please see the following page for details of all upcoming changes planned for July 2020 and beyond:  July 2020 Early Visibility Release Notice - Planned changes to upcoming SNOMED International Release packages.

Release Notes naming convention

The Release notes naming convention has been refined to bring it in line with other documentation standards - from this release onwards the files will have the following naming format:

• • doc_SnomedCTReleaseNotes_Current-en-US_INT_[date].pdf

   Instead of the previous underscore after "Current":

• • doc_SnomedCTReleaseNotes_Current_en-US_INT_[date].pdf

Document links

All links provide information that is correct and current at the time of this Release.  Updated versions may be available at a later date, but if so these will need to be requested from the relevant SNOMED International teams.