The SNOMED clinical terms development process: refinement and analysis of content.

SNOMED Clinical Terms is a comprehensive concept-based health care terminology that was created by merging SNOMED RT and Clinical Terms Version 3. Following the mapping of concepts and descriptions into a merged database, the terminology was further refined by adding new content, modeling the relationships of individual concepts, and reviewing the hierarchical structure. A quality control process was performed to ensure integrity of the data. Additional features such as subsets, qualifiers, and mappings to other coding systems were added or updated to facilitate usability. We then analyzed the content of the completed work. This paper describes the refinement processes and compares the actual content of SNOMED CT with the early data obtained from analysis of the description mapping process. As predicted, the majority of concepts in SNOMED CT originated from SNOMED RT or CTV3, but not both.