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 2023 February 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® January 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® January 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 August 2023 AT Release, as it was determined that these refsets had been added in error: 

Translated Content

New/Updated translated descriptions

This release contains translations from the Common German Translation. 27484 new, 31 updated and 85 inactivated descriptions for 17943 concepts were added, updated or inactivated:. This affects 17943 concepts,

Total number of translated Concepts

In total this release contains XXXXX 41846 concepts that have been translated into German

German (i.e. have at least one German description).

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:

Notice of changes to the AT Extension Release package

In line with the new implementation of Annotations, two new refsets have been added to the International Edition Release package, from December 2023 onwards:

• • der2_scsRefset_ComponentAnnotationStringValueSnapshot_INT_20231201.txt
  • der2_sscsRefset_MemberAnnotationStringValueSnapshot_INT_20231201.txt

The latest version of the AT Extension release is based upon the January 2024 International Edition, and therefore these Annotations file types will also be included in the AT Extension release package from the February 2024 AT release onwards, until further notice:

• • der2_scsRefset_ComponentAnnotationStringValueFull_AT1000234_20240215.txt
    
  • der2_scsRefset_ComponentAnnotationStringValueSnapshot_AT1000234_20240215.txt
    
  • der2_sscsRefset_MemberAnnotationStringValueFull_AT1000234_20240215.txt
    
  • der2_sscsRefset_MemberAnnotationStringValueSnapshot_AT1000234_20240215.txt

These refset files are empty for the February 2024 AT Extension release, whilst content is being authored for future editing cycles. 

Changes to the Identifier file format

In line with the proposals documented here:  https://confluence.ihtsdotools.org/mag/snomed-international-proposal-to-change-the-rf2-identifier-file-specification - the Austria Extension Release will from now on include the following changes to the format of the Identifier files:

• < identifierSchemeId    alternateIdentifier    effectiveTime    active    moduleId    referencedComponentId           ...to
• > alternateIdentifier    effectiveTime    active    moduleId    identifierSchemeId    referencedComponentId

These improvements are introduced in the August 2023 Austria Extension release, and will be used in all future Austria Extension releases until further notice.