Published on January 25, 2005

SNOMED CT® Mappings to NANDA, NIC, and NOC Now Licensed for Free Access Through National Library of Medicine

Nursing Mappings Add Critical Dimension for Improved Safety and Quality of Patient Care Nursing Mappings Add Critical Dimension for Improved Safety and Quality of Patient Care

Northfield, IL.—The College of American Pathologists has licensed to the National Library of Medicine (NLM) mappings from SNOMED CT to NANDA International (NANDA®) Taxonomy II, Nursing Interventions Classification (NIC) Version 4, and Nursing Outcomes Classification (NOC) Version 3. NLM will provide access through its Unified Medical Language System® (UMLS®) Metathesaurus®, a knowledge source containing biomedical concepts and terms from many controlled vocabularies and classifications.

In 2005, each mapping will be available free-of-charge to UMLS users who are licensed to use both SNOMED CT and the specific nursing terminology involved. In the case of SNOMED CT, U.S. federal agencies, state and local government agencies, territories, the District of Columbia, and any public, for-profit and non-profit organization located, incorporated and operating in the U.S. are covered by the U.S.-wide license announced by the Secretary of Health and Human Services in July 2003. NANDA maintains and owns the copyright to NANDA Taxonomy II. The Center for Nursing Classification and Clinical Effectiveness maintains NIC and NOC. Elsevier Science, a leading scientific publisher, owns the copyrights of both nursing classifications.

The mappings and SNOMED CT will continue to be available directly from SNOMED International in the SNOMED CT Structure.

NANDA Taxonomy II provides nursing diagnostic concepts that identify and code a patient's responses to health problems or life processes that explain variance in patient outcomes that is different than the variance explained by disease diagnoses. NIC encompasses nursing interventions used in all clinical settings and is used at the point of care to document care planning and nursing practice. NOC includes a comprehensive list of nursing outcomes, which provides a measurable way to evaluate the effect of nursing interventions on patient progress.

The SNOMED CT mappings of these leading nursing classifications will broaden nurses' access to the terminologies necessary to consistently and uniformly document nursing diagnoses, treatment and outcomes within electronic health records (EHRs). Utilizing the SNOMED CT nursing mappings will allow multiple, diverse practitioners access to comprehensive comparable information that relates to and can improve patient outcomes with the assurance that descriptions of diagnoses and treatments are represented consistently.

"The College has long held that by using a common approach to clinical coding, the coordination and exchange of information is enhanced across the continuum of care. Clinical care, decision support, and research, in addition to patient safety initiatives, rely on the same information," said Mary Kass, MD, FCAP, president of the College of American Pathologists. "SNOMED CT facilitates efficiency and interoperability between the NANDA, NIC, and NOC mappings adding a critical dimension to the nursing documentation systems at the point of care-where it is needed most. These relationships help to increase the accuracy of clinical documentation and communication thus reducing potential medical errors associated with traditional paper records."

Developed in collaboration with the United Kingdom's National Health Service, SNOMED CT's controlled healthcare terminology includes comprehensive coverage of diseases, clinical findings, therapies, procedures and outcomes. It provides the core general terminology for an electronic health record (EHR), containing more than 357,000 concepts with unique meanings and formal logic-based definitions organized into hierarchies. SNOMED CT is considered to be the most comprehensive multilingual clinical reference terminology available in the world.

The SNOMED Nursing Working Group, a working group of the SNOMED International Editorial Board, consists of nursing experts from SNOMED and the international nursing community. The group is responsible for specifying nursing requirements within SNOMED and will ensure that the mappings between the NANDA diagnoses concepts, the NIC intervention concepts and the NOC outcome concepts will be appropriately maintained within SNOMED CT.

"These mappings can help to improve the communication across the health care team that is essential to high quality health care. They will also help NLM to ensure accurate representation of nursing concepts within the UMLS," says Betsy Humphreys, Associate Director of NLM Library Operations. "Use of mappings between SNOMED’s uniform clinical language and nursing documentation systems should allow government and private organizations to create and share health care data more effectively."

The National Library of Medicine, the world's largest library of the health sciences, is part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. The NLM is located on the World Wide Web at http://www.nlm.nih.gov.

The College of American Pathologists is a not-for-profit medical society serving nearly 16,000 physician members and the laboratory community throughout the world. It is the world’s largest association composed exclusively of pathologists and is widely considered the leader in laboratory quality assurance. The CAP is an advocate for high quality and cost-effective patient care. The College is located on the World Wide Web at http://www.cap.org.

SNOMED International, a division of the College of American Pathologists, is committed to the excellence of patient care through the delivery of a dynamic and sustainable scientifically validated healthcare terminology and infrastructure that enables clinicians, researchers and patients to share health care knowledge worldwide, across clinical specialties and sites of care.

NANDA International® (NANDA®) can be located on the World Wide Web at http://www.nanda.org. The Center for Nursing Classification and Clinical Effectiveness is located at http://www.nursing.uiowa.edu/cnc and Elsevier Science can be found at http://www.elsevier.com.

For information regarding licensing the NIC and NOC languages that are not included in the mapping tool, please contact Karen Delany at Elsevier at 215-238-2223 or k.delany@elsevier.com .

SNOMED Contact:
Kathleen Van Gorden
401-454-7591
E-mail: Kvangorden@cap.org

CAP Contact :
Public Affairs
E-mail: publicaffairs@cap.org