There are a number of ways in which SNOMED CT can be used in systems to support analytics, including:

• Analyzing free text with clinical Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, which use SNOMED CT as a resource;
• Mapping coded clinical data from SNOMED CT to a classification, to enable analysis using the features of the classification;
• Querying clinical data using the machine-processable definitions of clinical concepts defined in SNOMED CT;
• Mapping clinical data captured using a variety of code systems into SNOMED CT, to enable analysis over heterogeneous data using a common reference terminology.

These approaches (and others) are described in more detail in the following chapters.