openEHR & SNOMED collab

We are pleased to announce a five-year collaboration agreement with SNOMED International, a not-for-profit organisation that owns and develops SNOMED CT, the world’s most comprehensive healthcare terminology product. SNOMED International plays an essential role in improving global health outcomes by determining standards for a codified language that represents groups of clinical terms, enabling healthcare information to be exchanged globally for the benefit of patients and other stakeholders. Like openEHR, they are committed to continuous innovation for the global healthcare community. 

Both our organisations are members of the Joint Initiative Council for Global Health Informatics Standardization and collaborate with European data standards bodies, as well as with HL7 International and CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency.

This collaboration is an important step forward for the openEHR community, which has identified a need to include SNOMED CT in openEHR archetypes and to ensure users of those archetypes employ an international terminology standard for interoperability. It will also facilitate the consistent representation of clinical content, whilst enabling openEHR to develop and include SNOMED CT concepts and codes associated with openEHR archetypes.

Many SNOMED International Members using openEHR will benefit from this collaboration. For example, Ireland uses openEHR for their shared care record archetype, so a formal collaboration with openEHR  is useful so that SNOMED CT can serve as the terminology within this and other related archetypes. Additionally, Jamaica uses openEHR for vaccination and lab tests; this collaboration will facilitate the ability to use a SNOMED CT terminology post-coordination approach with the integration of openEHR. And finally, the use of openEHR within the research community has been well established and use cases for research in countries such as Germany will find this collaboration beneficial in their research efforts. 

“I am delighted for the SNOMED International and openEHR community to be working together. It is an opportunity for us to make our standards more complementary and simpler for health systems globally to implement together. The openEHR community very much looks forward to the benefits this partnership will add for healthcare systems.” – Rachel Dunscombe, openEHR CEO.