Peter MacIsaac (MacIsaac Informatics) wrote: > It is with great pleasure that I draw your attention to a NEHTA press > release > > “7 July 2006: NEHTA signs up for free distribution of global health language > in Australia. > > NEHTA today announced that it has recently signed an agreement with SNOMED > International that enables the free use of SNOMED Clinical Terms® in > Australia from July 1 2006.” > > Further information at: > http://www.nehta.gov.au/content/view/136/144/
This is good news indeed. However, I sincerely hope that NEHTA make the necessary SNOMED-CT distribution files readily available to everyone with a minimum of bureaucratic fuss. The above-referenced press release includes this instruction: "Organisations who are interested in gaining free access to SNOMED CT for use in Australia should register their interest with NEHTA by emailing [EMAIL PROTECTED] " I would encourage all members of this list to send an email to the above NEHTA address expressing their interest, even if that interest extends no further than casually browsing through it to see what's there. On that note, I imagine that it will now be possible for the proof-of-concept Web-based free-text-to-SNOMED-CT-concept processing facility built by Jon Patrick's students at Sydney Uni can now be modified to return the actual SNOMED-CT concept ID (and associated descriptions) to those providing test data. That will allow more informed feedback to be able to be provided by test users. Another suggestion for Jon's students: a Web-based SNOMED-CT browser/search facility, perhaps using some nifty Web 2.0/AJAX methods to provide good interactivity, would be a boon, and likely to be very popular both here in Oz and around the world. At the moment, most SNOMED-CT browsing is done using a free (but not open source) Visual Basic GUI application called CLUE (see http://www.clininfo.co.uk/clue5/index.htm ), which is adequate but not great, and needs to be installed, along with the underlying SNOMED-CT data files, on every (Windows-only) computer on which you need to use it. So Twentieth Century... A SNOMED-CT look-up facility as a Web service would probably be popular too, especially if it were licensed under an open source license which permitted integration with both open source and closed source clinical applications (i.e. Mozilla or BSD licenced, rather than GPLed). There is first-mover advantage to be had here, as suddenly a brand new sub-market in SNOMED-CT-related health IT software has opened up overnight in Oz (and by extension in other parts of the world using or planning to use SNOMED-CT). Tim C _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
