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 November 2018 release of the SNOMED Clinical Terms^® Managed Service Sweden 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 Sweden Extension package is dependent upon, and should therefore be consumed in conjunction with the SNOMED CT® July 2018 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 2018 International Edition release has been translated and additional concepts for use in Sweden have been added.
For this release, the Swedish release centre for SNOMED CT have collaborated with the Swedish association of clinical dietitians to translate new content in the area of nutrition.
The quality of the Swedish translation has been assessed and a quality improvement effort has been started to address issues found. This can be seen for example in that there is an increased amount of inactivated, and replaced, Swedish descriptions. The work of assuring the quality of the Swedish translation is ongoing and improvements will be made over the coming Swedish releases. Examples of work done in this release includes:

• All case significance statuses of descriptions have been updated.
• Use of non-Swedish language characters have been reviewed and removed in case of errors.
• Batch updates have been applied to develop the Swedish translation further, e.g. replacing “sjukgymnastik” with “fysioterapi” as the preferred term with “sjukgymnastik” as a synonym throughout the translation.
• Duplicate descriptions, i.e. where two or more concepts with the same semantic tag share the same Swedish description, have been identified and are gradually being resolved over the coming releases.

3.2 New and Updated Content

Concept statistics

New concepts: 24

Table 1 New concepts by hierarchy

Inactivated concepts from the Swedish extension: 2
Changes to existing concepts in the Swedish extension: 2

Descriptions statistics

New synonyms added: 422
Inactivated descriptions: 344
New translations: 7044

Some concepts have not been translated into Swedish. The reasons for non-translation can vary and include concepts not relevant in a Swedish context and concepts were the name in Swedish and English is equivalent (e.g. the Latin names of organisms).

Table 2 Non-translated concepts by hierarchy

Reference sets

One new reference set has been added, 58181000052100 | urval kontaktsätt |, containing concepts for ways a patient may be in contact with care services, including physical contact, phone contact, video contact, etc.
The reference set 56421000052109 | urval aktivitetsstatus | has been updated with new members

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 - Sweden Extension November 2018, the following Known Issues were identified, and agreed to be resolved in the next editing cycle:

4.2 Technical notes