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.

The SNOMED CT Switzerland Extension - packages these components for release every December and July, to be used with the latest SNOMED CT International Edition release.

The same content can be viewed online using the SNOMED CT browser.

2 Background

This document provides a summarized description of the content changes included in the December 2021 Production release of the SNOMED Clinical Terms^® Managed Service Switzerland Extension package.

It will also include 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 Switzerland Extension package is dependent upon, and should therefore be consumed in conjunction with, the SNOMED CT® July 2021 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® July 2021 International Edition release has been included, alongside additional components for use in Switzerland. 

This extension contains concepts, relationships and reference sets for healthcare professionals. 

3.2 New and Updated Content

New content in this release:

This is the 1st SNOMED CT Switzerland Edition Production release.

This release primarily contains translations into the Swiss national languages German, French and Italian. The Common French edition was also included in this release. 

New and updated content

Concept statistics

The SNOMED Switzerland National Release Center published 3 new concepts, and these are available in the Switzerland Extension December release.

Total number of newly introduced concepts

Other concepts re-activated for use in Switzerland extension

Translations

This release primarily contains translations into the Swiss national languages.

Added German Translations

Added French Translations

Added Italian Translations

4 Technical notes

The Common French terms are in the Description files, but the Language Refset records for each Common French preference are not included in the Swiss Release Package. This leads to some gaps in the resolution of the dependencies. To reconcile the dependencies we recommend to download the Canadian edition of SNOMED CT alongside the Swiss Extension.

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 - Switzerland Extension Release, the following Known Issues were identified, and agreed to be resolved in the next editing cycle:

4.2 Resolved Issues

Resolved Issues are those where the resolution has been discussed and agreed, and has been implemented in time for this release. 

For the SNOMED CT Managed Service - Switzerland Extension Release, the following Issues were Resolved: