SNOMED CT

SNOMED CT standardizes clinical concepts to enable consistent coding and interoperability of healthcare data, facilitating mapping and findability of COVID-19 questionnaire items within OPAL/MICA-based systems.

Key Features:

• Interoperability Enhancement: SNOMED CT provides consistent terminology usage for COVID-19 questionnaire items to promote interoperability across healthcare systems and research databases.
• OPAL/MICA Integration and YAML Requirement: Implementation used OPAL/MICA on a test server and required data files formatted in YAML with a two-level hierarchy including Fully Specified Names (FSN) and SNOMED CT Identifiers (SCTID).
• Python Script Conversion (YAML Mode): Custom Python scripts converted SNOMED CT concepts into a compatible YAML "YAML Mode" format to enable integration despite lack of native release file support.
• Excel-Based Mapping (Excel Mode): Mappings between SNOMED CT terms and questionnaire data items were prepared in Excel ("Excel Mode") and processed with Python scripts for OPAL/MICA implementation.
• Comprehensive Data Item Mapping: Eight COVID-19 questionnaires comprising 1,178 data items were mapped to SNOMED CT terms.
• Workaround for Lack of Native SNOMED CT Support: Conversion to YAML and Excel-based approaches was used because OPAL/MICA could not directly support SNOMED CT release files, hierarchies, and post-coordination.

Scientific Applications:

• Healthcare research data standardization: Standardizing COVID-19 questionnaire data with SNOMED CT to ensure consistent interpretation and sharing across platforms and studies.
• Epidemiological analysis: Enabling aggregation and comparative analysis of symptom and outcome data across studies for large-scale epidemiological investigations.
• Symptom and outcome tracking: Facilitating accurate tracking of symptoms, patient outcomes, and related health metrics derived from questionnaires.

Methodology:

Questionnaire data items were prepared in Excel; Python scripts transformed SNOMED CT concepts (including FSN and SCTID) into a YAML format with a two-level hierarchy for OPAL/MICA integration, and mappings were executed and tested on a server.