Introduction

The Norwegian Directorate of eHealth provides SNOMED CT® terminologies both in Bokmål and Nynorsk language.  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 organization (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 same content can be viewed online using the SNOMED CT browser and it can be easily deployed via the free, open source SNOMED CT terminology server Snowstorm from SNOMED International.

Background

This document provides a summarized description of the content changes included in the October 2022 release of the SNOMED Clinical Terms® Managed Service Norway Extension package.  

This document will also include technical notes detailing 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 Norway Extension package is dependent upon, and therefore should be consumed in conjunction with the SNOMED CT® August 2022 International Edition release.

Scope

This document is written to give a summary and is not intended to provide specific details of the technical specifications for SNOMED CT or encompass every change made during the release.

Content Development Activity

This release contains translation corrections and improvements to existing content as well as minor technical corrections made as a result of upgrading the extension to use the SNOMED CT® August 2022 International Edition release. 

Summary

We are piloting this new feature which enables you to view more details about release statistics.  Results are available by selecting the Norwegian Edition at the drop down menu.  

https://browser.ihtsdotools.org/qa/#/descriptive-statistics

Technical Notes

Notice of changes to the International Edition Release Schedule

As you may already know SNOMED International have transitioned to a monthly delivery schedule for the International Edition of SNOMED CT. The move towards more frequent releases of SNOMED CT will realize several benefits, including:

• The potential to be able to get content changes into the terminology in a shorter time frame.
• The fostering of better interoperability, as a result of entities being able to consume release content that is more aligned with other organizations.
• The prevention of circular dependencies that occur in longer projects, due to the move towards smaller, more manageable authoring projects.
• More automated validation services, as a result of the inherent removal of the Alpha/Beta stages in the Release cycle.

Whilst most users will continue unaffected (as they can simply continue to download the releases every 6 months as always), this transition will necessarily involve a few changes to process/packages:

• Delta files have been removed from both International and Managed Service release packages, including the Norway Extension.  A Delta Generation service will be provided for those who need it. The Delta Generation Tool allows users to create their own Delta between two fixed release dates - you can find it here:
  • https://github.com/IHTSDO/delta-generator-tool/releases

• The ICD-O/ICD-10 Maps will continue to be published in each Monthly International Edition release package (in line with that month's content) for the foreseeable future, unless we experience issues with the new process in Production, and they need to be removed at a later date.

The first monthly Release of the SNOMED CT International Edition was published on the 28th February 2022 with the Delta files having been removed, and therefore they have been removed from the Norway Extension from the April 2022 Release onwards.

Please note - While the SNOMED CT International Edition is moving to monthly releases, the Norway Extension of SNOMED CT will remain on the current bi-annual release schedule of April and October for 2022.