Our Value Proposition/Mission Statement—
What We Can Offer You
Value Proposition
Are patient safety, clinical/operational efficiency, reimbursement, data sharing and compliance important to you? SNOMED Terminology Solutions (STS) develops solutions for customers around the world that maximize results in these critical areas. Let STS show you how to improve your organization’s use of a controlled medical vocabulary (CMV) and to achieve what is important through semantic interoperability for your electronic health record (EHR) and other health information technology systems.
The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and Gartner Research have identified a CMV as essential to EHR success and as the foundation for semantic interoperability—the ability of two or more systems to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged. A CMV like SNOMED Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) is essential to achieve semantic interoperability.
STS provides expert advice, implementation and education about SNOMED CT and other healthcare terminologies and classifications and has the expertise to help you achieve clinical and operational success by optimizing your electronic health applications and systems.
Patient Safety
Use of SNOMED CT within an EHR to develop the knowledge-based relationships allows for informed decision making thus increasing patient safety. For example, allergies must be linked to drugs and contraindications. The use of common language across clinical domains, at varying levels of specificity and with varying terminologies, can be used to convey these relationships within the application.
Clinical/Operational Efficiency
SNOMED CT facilitates interoperability of systems, which results in better patient outcomes and operational and financial benefits to healthcare providers. If clinicians have a clearer picture of a patient’s history instead of having to rely on the patient recalling various conditions, medications, and treatments, it will not only produce improved outcomes but will also reduce treatment costs including a reduction in test order duplication.
Reimbursement
Do you need a greater level of clinical detail than ICD classifications and CPT-4 can provide? SNOMED CT mappings to ICD-9-CM and CPT-4 integrate clinical and financial data to facilitate operational/financial efficiencies enabling provider organizations to automatically generate billing without need for coder review.
Data Sharing
Patient data available across the full spectrum of healthcare settings enhances continuity of care: family history, medications, allergies, diseases, and treatments that can be coded and shared among clinicians, sites of care, and even across national and international geographic boundaries.
When integrated into an EHR software system, SNOMED CT enables primary and specialty care providers to share comparable data at any time, from any place. Access to this knowledge will ultimately result in the delivery of improved, safer care.
Compliance
HITSP: The Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP) has named SNOMED CT in its interoperability standards for health information technology.
CCHIT: The Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology (CCHIT) includes SNOMED CT in its certification requirements as part of compliance to HITSP specifications.
Pan Canadian Standards: The Canada Health Infoway Clinical Terminology Integration pan-Canadian Standards Group (pCSG) identified SNOMED CT as the most suitable choice of terminology for 24 priority clinical information groupings of the core interoperable EHR.
International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO): IHTSDO member countries (Australia, Canada, Denmark, Lithuania, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, Sweden, United Kingdom, and United States) are developing clinical terminology strategies around SNOMED CT.
SNOMED Terminology Solutions Mission
SNOMED Terminology Solutions (STS), a division of the College of American Pathologists (CAP), is a leader in the transformation of diversified health information into the reality of global interoperability, thereby advancing patient care and health information science.