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 March 2019 Production release of the SNOMED Clinical Terms^® Managed Service Belgium Extension package.

It will also includes 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 Belgium Extension package is dependent upon, and should therefore be consumed in conjunction with the SNOMED CT® January 2019 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® January 2019 International Edition release has been translated and additional components for use in Belgium have been added. 

This extension contains concepts, relationships and reference sets with their Dutch and French translations for healthcare professionals.

3.2 New and Updated Content

New Belgian content in this release:

The Belgian extension contains:

• 26.814 translated international concepts, including:
  • 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, 1.945 French synonyms and 1.373 Dutch synonyms have been included.

The concepts of the extension belong to the following hierarchies:

FRENCH

LanguageCode

FR

Hierarchies

Accepted

Preferred

Grand Total FR

core metadata concept

1

1

disorder

1536

4424

5960

environment

145

145

event

5

2300

2305

finding

334

878

1212

foundation metadata concept

2

2

geographic location

618

618

occupation

236

236

organism

17120

17120

procedure

23

867

890

regime/therapy

1

156

157

situation

46

67

113

Grand Total

1945

26814

28759

No new concepts were added to the Belgian extension.

Updated Belgian content:

The Belgian extension has been reviewed and adapted in accordance with the new linguistic guidelines.

In the Dutch language reference set

• 291 concepts have been updated (1 procedure, 290 disorders):
  • 210 preferred terms were added
  • 125 acceptable terms were added
  • 9 acceptable terms were changed to preferred terms
  • 72 preferred terms were changed to acceptable terms
  • 147 preferred terms were deleted
  • 62 acceptable terms were deleted

In the French language reference set

•  4 concepts have been updated (2 disorders, 2 organisms)
• 3 preferred terms were added
• 1 preferred term was changed to an acceptable term
• 2 preferred terms were deleted
• 2 acceptable terms were deleted

DUTCH

LanguageCode

NL

Hierarchies

Accepted

Preferred

Grand Total NL

core metadata concept

1

1

disorder

1102

4424

5526

environment

145

145

event

5

2300

2305

finding

238

878

1116

foundation metadata concept

 0

2

2

geographic location

618

618

occupation

236

236

organism

17120

17120

procedure

20

867

887

regime/therapy

3

156

159

situation

5

67

72

Grand Total

1373

26814

28187

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

4.2 Technical notes

 No additional technical notes for this release.