Developing a national emergency department data reference set based on SNOMED CT.

Emergency departments around Australia use a range of software to capture data on patients' reason for encounter, presenting problem and diagnosis. The data collected are mainly based on descriptions and codes of the International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision, Australian modification (ICD-10-AM), with each emergency department having a tailored list of terms. The National E-Health Transition Authority is introducing a standard clinical terminology, the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine--Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT), as one of the building blocks of an e-health infrastructure in Australia. The Australian e-Health Research Centre has developed a software platform, Snapper, which facilitates mapping of existing clinical terms to the SNOMED CT terminology. Using the Snapper software, reference sets of terms for emergency departments are being developed, based on the Australian version of SNOMED CT (SNOMED CT-AU). Existing software systems need to be able to implement these reference sets to support standardised recording of data at the point of care. As the terms collected will be part of a larger terminology, they will be useful for patients' admission and discharge summaries and for computerised clinical decision making. Mapping existing sets of clinical terms to a national emergency department SNOMED CT reference set will facilitate consistency between emergency department data collections and improve the usefulness of the data for clinical and analytical purposes.