Chapter 22 - Benefits of using SNOMED CT in the UK National Health Service (NHS)

This chapter will provide an honest account drawing on real-life experience of how using SNOMED CT has impacted NHS trusts in the UK, over the past few years, offering insight on the processes and challenges as well as sharing lessons learned for the audience. It focuses on the clinical benefits of implementing SNOMED CT, gaining valuable insight from use cases in UK NHS trusts that have already made the changeover. It will cover the practical necessities to wider service implications, and these insights and ‘top tips’ will enable readers to accurately predict and overcome likely challenges when implementing SNOMED CT. The topics covered are what is involved from a trust perspective and where in an NHS trust is SNOMED CT used and for what purposes. It will cover the implementation challenges describing those which are inherent and which are part of implementation. It will discuss practical approaches including how much time, training and expertise is needed and what are the real costs. It will also cover how SNOMED CT interacts with classifications such as ICD-10 and OPCS-4 × and the process of mapping SNOMED CT to clinical coding systems. It will look at how various terms in SNOMED CT are represented within the electronic health record (EHR) and how much of the terminology do staff really need to understand to use effectively direct care and subsequent secondary uses.