ihtsdo / snomed-vendor-toolkit

This repository is toolkit for those looking to implement SNOMED CT into any software solution. The toolkit provides a single location to access key documents, tools and education information

SNOMED CT Vendor Toolkit (beta)

This repository is toolkit for those looking to implement SNOMED CT into any software solution. The toolkit provides a single location to access key documents, tools and education information.

To download a local copy of this repository, please see the releases page.

Introduction

Over the last 3 years, SNOMED International has made a concerted effort to engage software and services vendors who provide solutions in the healthcare space, with the aim of better understanding and supporting vendors in their efforts to deliver the best possible solutions to their customers.

What we discovered over this time is that there are vast differences between vendors in terms of SNOMED CT understanding, capacity and overall implementation maturity. Vendors and other implementers continue to face a spectrum of challenges, from “Where do we start?” or “How do we improve the usage of SNOMED at the clinician interface?”, to “ How do we begin to leverage the ontology for analytics purposes?”

Given these significant differences, the Vendor Engagement group at SNOMED International, working closely with the Vendor Liaison Forum, distilled the various challenges into 3 primary questions:

1. How do we support vendors in educating their staff in a reasonable amount of time and at low cost?
2. How do we facilitate easier integration of SNOMED CT into hundreds of disparate systems?
3. How do we provide the ability for vendors to find and access the many refsets that exist worldwide, to fast-track implementations and improve support for vendor product planning and design?

From these questions was borne the concept of the Vendor Toolkit, a resource for vendors that attempts to address these barriers to implementation through the easy access to resources that help answer these questions.

While the Toolkit is intended to grow and evolve based on vendor feedback and our understanding of requirements, the Toolkit initially contains the following directories:

Documents

SNOMED International has an extensive library of documents on SNOMED CT from starter guides to how to implement SNOMED CT in healthcare systems. We have provided some initial useful documents here in one location to get you and your teams started.

Education

The SNOMED International Education and Product Support group provide a robust platform for educating staff at various levels and roles within vendor organizations. We have curated the SNOMED CT education offerings to provide value to novice developers, experienced terminologists and technicians, as well as business resources who may find a need to better understand SNOMED CT.

Tooling

From an implementation and adoption perspective, purpose-built tooling is a critical component for easily integrating SNOMED CT into disparate vendor solutions. SNOMED International’s Technical Services team provide valuable and easy to use tooling that will provide significant assistance to software developers.

Content

Providing content products represent a less straight-forward, yet necessary, proposition given the diverse needs of end-users. To close this gap we’ve provided links and access to Refsets resources developed by some of SNOMED International’s most advanced Member National Release Centres (NRCs).

Key Links Of Interest

• SNOMED CT E-Learning Server (http://snomed.org/elearning)
• SNOMED International Website (http://snomed.org)
• SNOMED CT Collaboration Platform (http://snomed.org/confluence)
• SNOMED CT Browser (http://browser.ihtsdotools.org)