About SNOMED CT

SNOMED CT is the most comprehensive, multilingual clinical healthcare terminology in the world. It is a resource with comprehensive, scientifically validated clinical content that enables the consistent representation of clinical content in electronic health records. SNOMED CT is mapped to other international standards and it's in use in more than eighty countries.

The SNOMED CT clinical terminology has unmatched depth, enabling clinicians to record data with enhanced accuracy and consistency. SNOMED CT remains a growing and evolving product made better by the Community of Practice.  SNOMED CT supports the development of comprehensive high-quality clinical content in electronic health records. It provides a standardized way to represent clinical phrases captured by the clinician and enables automatic interpretation of these.

SNOMED International is a not-for-profit organization that owns and maintains SNOMED CT, with the participation of representatives from more than 40 member countries and a community of experts.

Learn more about SNOMED in https://www.snomed.org/snomed-ct/why-snomed-ct

About IPS

The International Patient Summary (IPS) is a minimal and non-exhaustive set of basic clinical data of a patient, specialty-agnostic, condition-independent, but readily usable by all clinicians. The original use case was to support cross-border, unscheduled patient care, but it has the potential to be used in many other use cases where the patient crosses information systems, like travel between provinces, cities, or organizations that use a different Health Information System and require a summary for immediate care.

IPS is maintained by a collaboration of different Standard Development Organizations including ISO, CEN, HL7 International, IHE International, and SNOMED International.

Learn more about the IPS in https://international-patient-summary.net/

Scope of the guide

This guide describes the IPS Terminology structure, content, and use cases. As the IPS Terminology is fully contained in any standard edition of any SNOMED CT release, the guide supports the decision process for implementers that need to provide IPS functionalities in Health Information Systems and need to understand the features and limitations that are determined by the adoption of either terminology package. This guide summarizes the implementation information required to implement the terminology in a terminology server and links to more detailed, step-by-step documentation.

The structure, content, and implementation approaches of SNOMED CT are described elsewhere, in the SNOMED Document Library (http://snomed.org/doc).

The structure and representation of the IPS, as well as the terminology binding between IPS and SNOMED CT, are documented elsewhere, in the IPS implementation guides (i.e. http://hl7.org/fhir/uv/ips/).

Target audience

The IPS Terminology and this guide are aimed at non-Member Affiliates, users that need to implement an IPS solution, including use cases like data entry, exchanging information, analytics. Non-Member Affiliates do not have access to a SNOMED CT License and can implement the basic features of SNOMED CT with this free resource.

The guide contains an overall description of the IPS Terminology and its features useful for decision-makers, and it contains technical documentation for implementers.

All users located in SNOMED International member countries, or users who have an affiliate license to a complete edition of SNOMED CT, should NOT use this resource and should implement the IPS applications using a full edition of SNOMED CT. The IPS Reference Set, included in the International Edition of SNOMED CT, identifies the subset of concepts that are part of the IPS Terminology.