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.

Background

This document provides a summarized description of the content changes included in the August 2024 Production release of the SNOMED Clinical Terms^® Managed Service Austria 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 Austria Extension package is dependent upon, and should therefore be consumed in conjunction with the SNOMED CT® July 2024 International Edition release.

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.

Content Development Activity

Summary

Content from the SNOMED CT® July 2024 International Edition release has been incremented, using additional components for use in Austria. 

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

New and Updated Content

This release INACTIVATES the 15 refset concepts that were previously added in the February 2024 AT Release, as it was determined that these refsets had been added in error: 

contains no inactivated or newly added Austria specific refsets, concepts, relationships etc. For details on added translations please view the section "Translated Content".

Translated Content

New/Changed

Translated Content

translated descriptions

This release contains translations from the Common German Translation. 27484 7680 new, 31 updated and 85 inactivated 122 changed and 682 inactivated descriptions were added, updated or inactivated. This affects 17943 concepts 4660 concepts,

Total number of translated Conceptsconcepts & descriptions

In total this release contains 41846 45407 concepts that have been translated into German (i.e. have at least one German description) totalling 62397 active German descriptions.

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.  

For the SNOMED CT Managed Service - Austria Extension Release, the following Known Issues were identified, and agreed to be resolved in the next editing cycle:

Technical notes

Removal of the Common German refsets

In the August 2023 AT Extension release, 15 Common German refsets were added to the release package.  It was later determined that these should not have been added, and therefore the Austrian NRC decided to remove them completely from the February 2024 Extension package, plus all future AT Extension releases.

These refsets have therefore had their:

• Concepts inactivated +
• Refset files (both full + snapshot) removed completely from the package.  This step is not usually applied, as inactivation is usually preferable to deletion, but in cases of error like this, it is sometimes decided that the complete removal will be less confusing for end users going forward, as opposed to retaining completely irrelevant content in all future packages.
• NOTE:  RefsetDescriptor records remain ACTIVE (as per precedent) as the refset patterns themselves have not been inactivated, just these particular examples of the refsets.  

The refsets in question are as follows:

Unit codes reference set (foundation metadata concept)30191001000109Top-level Concepts and common terms reference set (foundation metadata concept)

Notice of changes to the AT Extension Release package

In line with the refined implementation of Annotations, we are updating all Extensions in order to align them with the updated version of the refsets in the International Edition Release package (which were first published in June 2024).

1. After discussions with the community, SNOMED International made changes to the coverage of language in the Annotations refsets in the following way:

• The languageCode field was specified as the two characters of ISO-639-1 code for the language of the annotation text. The change includes support for specifying dialect when it is applicable by adhering to RFC 5646, which allows the combination of two characters of ISO 639-1 code and two uppercase letters of country code (ISO 3166) separated by a hyphen.  The changes apply to both the Member Annotations String Value Reference Set + Component Annotation String Value reference set:
• The column "languageCode" has therefore been changed to "languageDialectCode".
  • Component Annotations (1292992004)
    • OLD:    id    effectiveTime    active    moduleId    refsetId    referencedComponentId    languageCode    typeId    value
    • NEW:   id    effectiveTime    active    moduleId    refsetId    referencedComponentId    languageDialectCode    typeId    value
  • Member Annotations (1292995002)
    • OLD:   id    effectiveTime    active    moduleId    refsetId    referencedComponentId    referencedMemberId    languageCode    typeId    value
    • NEW:  id    effectiveTime    active    moduleId    refsetId    referencedComponentId    referencedMemberId    languageDialectCode    typeId    value

2. In line with the changes to the Annotations refsets, the following refinements have also been made to the RefsetDescriptor records: