SNOMED sold to new international standards organisation

Tags: A coding Community England Information iS Quality Standards UK US

27 Apr 2007

The intellectual property rights of SNOMED Clinical Terms have been sold for $7.8m (£3.6m) to a newly-formed board called the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation, based in Denmark.

The IHSTDO is made up of nine nations – Australia, Canada, Denmark, Lithuania, The Netherlands, New Zealand, the United States and the United Kingdom with Connecting for Health acting as the host organisation for the UK’s National Release Centre.

The group is assuming responsibility for the maintenance, development, quality assurance, and distribution of SNOMED CT with former owners, the College of American Pathologists (CAP) continuing to support standards development organisation (SDO) operations under an initial three year contract.

IHTSDO’s management board chair, Professor Martin Severs, said: “We are delighted with the initial success of this truly international undertaking. Making SNOMED CT available this way is an example of how global health cooperation can benefit health systems, services, and products in the UK and around the world.

“Most of all it is about better supporting the care of people – patients, clients and citizens – who can and should benefit from organisational and technological advances such as this.”

CfH’s UK National Release Centre for SNOMED CT will be known as the UK Terminology Centre and will be responsible for managing, distributing, supporting and controlling the use of SNOMED CT and related assets throughout the UK.

It will provide an interface between all IHTSDO member release centres and any UK-based users interested in getting a SNOMED CT royalty-free licence to use the coding in their environments.

Connecting for Health chief executive, Richard Granger, said: “It became very clear with the establishment of NHS Connecting for Health in England that legacy arrangements around clinical terminology with a bilateral and costly arrangement between the UK and the US were not sustainable or indeed desirable.

“The establishment on a firm footing of a multinational initiative will help to ensure the standards used by the NHS in England, as we continue to roll out systems, will be compatible with those in other countries. This will benefit both patients who move between countries and also reduce the risk of England continuing to need jurisdiction-specific systems with significant concurrent costs.”

SNOMED – the Systemised Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms – is considered to be the most comprehensive, multilingual clinical healthcare terminology in the world and can be use to represent clinically relevant information to help standardise electronic health records.

CAP’s president, Thomas Sodeman, said: “As the international adoption and use of SNOMED CT has grown, it has become apparent that an international governance structure that is open to the entire global healthcare community would be to everyone’s benefit. The college is proud to have assisted in this important milestone.”

CAP will continue to provide SNOMED-related products and services as a licensee of the terminology.

Industry expert Tim Benson told EHI the acquisition would ‘change the landscape’ of clinical terminology.

Links

CAP

IHTSDO

Readers Comments

Congratulations

30 Apr 07 16:13

Congratulations to the team for pulling this one off. There's been a lot of hard work to produce an organisation that can support SNOMED internationally.

re: Congratulations

30 Apr 07 17:37

I would rather say there's been a lot of hard work to produce an organisation which MUST support SNOMED internationally.

Richard Granger defined the challenge perfectly.

>>It became very clear with the establishment of NHS Connecting for Health in England that legacy arrangements around clinical terminology with a bilateral and costly arrangement between the UK and the US were not sustainable or indeed desirable."<<

Instead of a "bi-lateral and costly arrangement" we now have a noni-lateral arrangement. Will that prove more desirable or sustainable?

Seasoned observers see the terminology maintenance cost "hot potato" being passed from the NHS to CAP, then almost being passed to the US National Library of Medicine, then passed on to the SDO. We also see the same faces doing the same jobs making the same promises only with different job titles and paymasters.

Whatever, SNOMED now HAS to supply a high quality implementable product that delivers on its promises of electronic medical record interoperability. There is no one else left to pass the buck to until we meet extra-terrestrials prepared to set up an Interplanetary Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation. Given the time waiting to see any significant use of SNOMED in NPfIT that may well happen first.

What if not this is a victory?

02 May 07 02:09

Why so few commentators?

Here is the establishment of an international standard. Surely we needed one. Are the detractors happy with the funcionality, existing Quality Assured interoperability, and selfless enthousiasm of existing suppliers?

C'mon health informatics professonals, why so little interest, is it good news for once, or a lack of credibility. Man on the moon, tilting trains in Stoke-on-Trent, why not celebrate? Or are we still fixated on above-average PAS deployments, or worse still below-average ones?

Some perspectives

colin@clinformation.com

02 May 07 10:36

Sorry to sound pedantic but this is the establishment of an international standards organisation, not an international standard as a previous comment suggests. Experience with maintaining the Read Codes suggests that the costs of doing this as a national endeavour appear very favourable when set against the combined costs of participation in an international initiative plus a UK localisation service. And that is quite apart from other issues such as autonomy and responsiveness: do NHS clinicians, for example, still have 50% of the editorial control under the new arrangements?

I am also wondering, given the scale of the NHS's historical investment in terminology (all the IPR of which is now embedded in SNOMED), why - for the relatively modest reported asking price of £3.6m - didn't the NHS buy it from its strategic partner since 1999 (CAP)? It would be interesting to see how CfH assessed the costs, benefits and risks here.

The hard fact is that we are not much nearer to having an implemented NHS-wide clinical terminology now than we were 15 years ago when the much-maligned Clinical Terms Project started (other than in primary care). The reason for this probably relates more to a lack of understanding about the role and deployment of any very large coded thesaurus (CTV3, SNOMED, whatever) across multiprofessional clinical records and communications, than to the nature of the organisational structure that maintains it.

This development may - or may not - turn out to be a good thing. In terms of moving the NHS's electronic agenda forwards, though, I suspect it's of little relevance.

Is it a victory?

04 May 07 21:27

So a product the UK has spent nearly twenty years on and millions of pounds is now based in Denmark rather than the US. Is this really something to celebrate? The day to celebrate will be when all the time and resource spent on this product actually leads to widespread improvement in the quality of recorded information in UK healthcare. As Colin identified in the previous posting, we do not appear to be any closer to this.

Dare one ask who has received the $7.8 million? The UK taxpayer perhaps?

But at least the independent Chair of the Information Standards Board which approves standards for use in the NHS is also the chair of the new IHSTDO.