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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.

This beta release contains a limited set of translated concepts and will allow affiliates to become familiar with the format of the Belgian national extension (expected release date 15th March). This beta release package is distributed for testing purposes only. It must not be used in production clinical systems or in clinical settings.

2 Background

This document provides a summarized description of the content changes included in the December 2017 BETA 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® July 2017 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.

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3 Content Development Activity

3.1 Summary

Content from the SNOMED CT® July 2017 International Edition release has been translated and additional components for use in Belgium have been added. 

New Belgian content in this Beta release:

The Belgian extension contains:

• 314 translated international concepts
• 2 new concepts
• 3 concepts specific to the Belgian release, namely:
  • The Belgian module (core metadata concept)
  • The French and Dutch language refset (foundation metadata concept)

All concepts have a French and Dutch preferred term. In addition, 12 Dutch synonyms and 4 French synonyms have been included.

The concepts of the extension belong to the following hierarchies:

3.2 New and Updated Content

As this is a first time release, there are no previously published packages with which to compare in order to generate this data.

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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 December 2017 BETA Release, the following Known Issues were identified, and agreed to be resolved in the next editing cycle:

4.2 Technical notes