Spain is the third country joining IHTSDO after Charters Members (Australia, Canada, Denmark, Netherlands, United States of America, New Zealand, Lithuania, United Kingdom and Sweden) plus Singapore and Cyprus, that joined in 2008.
"We are delighted to welcome Spain as a new member of IHTSDO," says Martin Severs, Chair of IHTSDO's Management Board. He also added, "Our work on health terminology standards is a global effort to respond to needs that we all share. By pooling our experiences and our resources, we can make more progress than any one country could do on its own, which benefits patients and health professionals in all of our nations."
The use of a standardised clinical terminology like SNOMED CT, to describe the information that health records contains, promotes consistency, accuracy, and reliability of health information and contributes to improved patient safety.
"SNOMED CT is already being used in Spain in some specific cases by some professional groups and institutions. What we aim now is to boost the use in the Spanish health organizations and in coordination with the Regional Authorities," says Javier Etreros, director of the Project "Electronic Health Record within the National Health System".
In joining IHTSDO, Spain will be able to distribute the international core of this standard to all the public and private organizations that need to use it within the Spanish territory. Furthermore, Spanish experts' participation in the different IHTSDO working groups and committees, will ensure that future versions of SNOMED CT give better support to the Spanish system's unique characteristics.
All of this will permit that the main standardised health terminology in the world (used in more than 40 countries) will be available in the all Spanish territory to be used, in the electronic health records as well than in information systems that measure the health care assistance activity results, clinical investigation and other applications.
In the semantic interoperability roadmap, designed by the Ministry of Health and Social Policy at the beginning of 2008, the goals to enable exchange of information between different health record systems (including different languages) were identified. The use of SNOMED-CT terminology is one of these goals.
The Ministry keeps working in coordination with the Regional Authorities to develop the Electronic Health Record within the National Health System (EHRNHS). The objective of this project is to guarantee, to citizens and health professionals the access to all the relevant clinical information needed in the health care assistance process, from any point within the National Health System.
About IHTSDO and SNOMED CT
The IHTSDO (International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation) and its Members seek to improve the health of humankind by fostering the development and use of suitable standardized clinical terminologies, notably SNOMED CT, in order to support the safe, accurate, and effective exchange of health information. The IHTSDO is an international organisation, established as a Danish not-for-profit association. SNOMED Clinical Terms™ (SNOMED CT™) is a standardized terminology that can be used as the foundation for electronic health records and other applications. For example, different clinicians often use different terms to describe the same concept. SNOMED CT contains more than 310,000 unique concepts and more than 1.3 million links or relationships between them that ensure that this information is captured consistently, accurately, and reliably across the health system. The terminology is used in more than forty countries around the world. SNOMED CT was originally created by the College of American Pathologists by combining SNOMED RT and a computer-based nomenclature and classification known as Clinical Terms Version 3, formerly known as Read Codes Version 3, which was created on behalf of the UK Department of Health and is Crown copyright.
For more information, visit http://www.ihtsdo.org.
SNOMED, SNOMED CT, and IHTSDO are trademarks of the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation. All other trademarks used in this document are the property of their respective owners.