HL7 Australia AGM - December 2006

SNOMED-Clinical Terms is the standard medical terminology or coding system for representing in-formation in clinical computing systems used at the “point of care” in Australia. A national licence is now available from NEHTA and work is ongoing to link a standard terminology of medicines and pathology to the core SNOMED-CT.

SNOMED-CT is more complex and has functionality not present in existing terminologies and code sets. Effective implementation will require a good understanding of SNOMED and technically advanced strategies for clinical data entry, storage and retrieval. Terminology is necessary but not sufficient alone to support standard data representation; hence the need for standard health record and message structures. While the complete national implementation of SNOMED-CT will take some years, it is important that policy makers and the health software industry start to plan and understand the issues involved. Some Australian IT companies are already implementing SNOMED. This workshop will provide a practical introduction to SNOMED with a focus on how it is intended to be used in clinical information systems. There will be some hands-on sessions so please bring your WiFi-enabled laptop.

This Workshop will be headlined with a key-note address from Sarah Ryan, HL7.org USA, on the current international situation with implementation of SNOMED-CT and presentations on the business and clinical benefits to be derived from using SNOMED-CT. Sarah has worked in the US on the development of SNOMED and implementation at the Centres for Disease Control and the National Library of Medicine and NASA. She manages the HL7 Terminfo project office which is working on the standard implementation of SNOMED in the next generation of HL7 messages and document standards.

HL7 Australia represents developers and implementers of the HL7 family of standards. I believe that a consistent use of terminology, within both HL7 message structures and the underlying health system data storage systems, is essential to support interoperability of electronic health information systems and smart functions such as decision support.

We will be holding our Annual General Meeting and end-of-year drinks after the Workshop and all participants are welcome to join our members.

Note: This Workshop is endorsed by the Health Information Management Association of Australia (HIMAA) and attendance will give HIMAA members 20 CPD points (40 for rural/remote members). Please see http://www.HIMAA.org.au/Credentialling/default.htm