SNOMED Adds Nursing Terms

The American College of Pathologists has signed an agreement to integrate detailed nursing interventions and outcomes classifications into the College’s SNOMED Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) product.

Though the announcement focuses nursing concepts developed in the US it could have significance for the NHS, which is thought to be inching towards adopting SNOMED CT as the official standard clinical coding classification and terminology.

Currently the only mandated clinical terminology within the service remains Read Codes, which primary care systems must be compliant with in order to be eligible for funding.

SNOMED CT is currently being evaluated by the NHS Information Authority, which has made a substantial investment in the development of the terminology. A final decision on whether SNOMED will become the mandated standard clinical terminology for the NHS is now promised once the NHSIA has completed its evaluation early in 2003.

The agreement between the ACP, publishers Elsevier Science and the Centre for Nursing Classification and Clinical Effectiveness at the University of Iowa College for Nursing covers integrating concepts from the Nursing Interventions Classification (NIC) and Nursing Outcomes Classification (NOC) into SNOMED CT.

While the Centre for Nursing Classification and Clinical Effectiveness maintains NIC and NOC, international publisher Elsevier Science owns the copyright to the publications.

NIC encompasses nursing interventions used in all clinical settings and is used at the point of care to document care planning and nursing practice, while NOC provides a comprehensive list of nursing outcomes, providing a way to evaluate nursing interventions.

Mapping the two sets of classifications into SNOMED CT will increase nurses’ access to the tools necessary to consistently and uniformly document nursing treatments and outcomes at the point of care.

A dedicated SNOMED nursing terminology group will lead the task of mapping the 486 NIC intervention concepts and 260 NOC outcomes concepts into the more that 325,000 concepts already contained in SNOMED CT.

"We are dedicated to expanding the depth and scope of SNOMED CT in all clinical domains. Our convergence of the NIC and NOC classifications into the terminology further demonstrates our commitment to the nursing profession," said Diane Aschman, Chief Operating Officer of SNOMED International.