The killer move would be to do something I advocated for years
unsuccessfully: *separate SNOMED technology from content *and allow them
to be independently licensable and used. Here, technology means
representation (RF2 for example), open source programming libraries for
working with ref-sets, specs and implems for e..g the constraint
language, URIs and so on.
It should be possible for a country (the one I am most familiar with
w.r.t. to terminology today is Brazil) to create an empty 'SNOMED
container' of its own, and put its existing terminologies in there -
typically procedure lists, drug codes, lab codes, devices & prosthesis
codes, packages (chargeable coarse-grained packages like childbirth that
you get on a health plan) and so on. There are usually < 20k or even 10k
such codes for most countries (UK and US would an exception), not
counting lab analyte codes (but even there, 2000 or so codes would take
care of most results). But the common situation is that nearly every
country has its own version of these things, and they are far smaller
than SNOMED. Now, SNOMED's version of things is usually better for /some
/of that content, but in some cases, /it is missing concepts/.
The ability to easily create an empty SNOMED repo, fill it with national
vocabularies, have it automatically generate non-clashing (i.e. with
other countries, or the core) concept codes and mappings, and then serve
it from a standard CTS2 (or other decent standard) terminology service
would have revolutionised things in my view. This pathway has not been
obviously available however, and has been a real blockage. The error was
not understanding that the starting point for most countries isn't the
international core, it's their own vocabularies.
The second killer feature would have been to *make creating and managing
ref-sets for data/form fields much easier*, based on a subsetting
language that can be applied to the core, and tools that implement that.
Ways are needed to make the local / legacy vocabularies that have been
imported, to look like a regular ref-set.
The third killer feature would have been to *make translation tools work
*on the basis of legacy vocabulary and new ref-sets, not on the basis of
the huge (but mostly unused) international core.
I think IHTSDO's / SNOMED International's emphasis has historically been
on curating the core content, and making/buying tools to do that (the
IHTSDO workbench, a tool that comes with its own PhD course), rather
than promulgating SNOMED technology and tooling to enable the mess of
real world content in each country to be rehoused in a standard way, and
incrementally joined up by mapping or other means to the core. I think
the latter would have been more helpful.
There is additionally an elephant in the room: *IHTSDO (now SNOMED
International) has been tied to a single terminology - SNOMED CT*, but
it would have been better to have had a terminology standards org that
was independent of any particular terminology, and worked to create a
truly terminology-independent technology ecosystem, along with technical
means of connecting terminologies to each other, without particularly
favouring any one of them. It's just a fact that the world has LOINC,
ICDx, ICPC, ICF and hundreds of other terminologies that are not going
anywhere. What would be useful would be to:
* classify them according to meta-model type - e.g. multi-hierarchy
(Snomed); single hierarchy (ICDx, ICPC, ... ); multi-axial (LOINC);
units (UCUM, ...), etc
* build / integrate technology for each major category - I would guess
< 10
* help the owning orgs slowly migrate their terminologies to the
appropriate representation and tools
* embark on an exercise to graft in appropriate upper level
ontology/ies, i.e. BFO2, RO, and related ontologies (this is where
the <10 comes from by the way)
* specify standards for URIs, querying, ref-sets that /work across all
terminologies/, not just SNOMED CT
A further program would look at integrating units (but not by the
current method of importing to SNOMED, which is a complete error because
of the different meta-models), drugs and substances (same story), lab
result normal and other range data, and so on. None of this can be done
without properly studying and developing the underlying ontologies,
which are generally small, but subtle.
I'll stop there for now. I suspect I have kicked the hornet's nest, but
since Grahame kicked it first, and I can run faster than him, I feel
oddly safe. Probably an illusion.
- thomas
On 13/03/2018 12:12, Grahame Grieve wrote:
I am get the impression that SNOMED CT is hard to implement, and
therefore wondered if we are at some kind of tipping point, like
where HL7v3 was a few years ago, and some bright spark came along,
and now we have FHIR that is gaining great traction in the health
community due to the ease at which it can be implemented.
this is very true, and I wish that someone would stick their neck out
and do this at scale with
a community behind them. Many of the parameters for how it could be
done are obvious around
free and crowd-support etc. But the big problem is that there is no
capacity for it to happen as a
palace revolution; it must be a full civil war first.
Grahame
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Thomas Beale
Principal, Ars Semantica <http://www.arssemantica.com>
Consultant, ABD Team, Intermountain Healthcare
<https://intermountainhealthcare.org/>
Management Board, Specifications Program Lead, openEHR Foundation
<http://www.openehr.org>
Chartered IT Professional Fellow, BCS, British Computer Society
<http://www.bcs.org/category/6044>
Health IT blog <http://wolandscat.net/> | Culture blog
<http://wolandsothercat.net/>
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