London, United Kingdom, February 23, 2023 -- SNOMED International is welcoming two new directors to its Management Board.

The organization’s Management Board is a governance body with legal and oversight responsibility for the management and direction of SNOMED International. It offers the organization a wealth of experience in global healthcare and informatics, advanced technologies, organizational governance and business leadership and risk management, guiding us as we execute against our strategy and plan for the future. Management Board directors’ expertise and industry relationships are key to helping SNOMED International leverage technologies and strengthen partnerships with our many stakeholders worldwide, and guide the organization on the development and execution of our current five-year strategy.

Anne-Marie Grey brings more than 30 years of humanitarian fundraising and marketing experience, both in the United States and internationally to SNOMED International. The recent Executive Director and CEO for USA for UNHCR, Anne-Marie is the Principal Director at New York-based Grey-O’Keefe Consulting LLC, a training, strategy, and marketing agency that brings causes and corporations together to positively impact society and business. She brings to the Board her unique and extensive leadership skills in both the not-for-profit and private sectors. Anne-Marie has mentored and advised non-profit leaders on resource mobilization, leadership and strategy at organizations such as the Forbes Nonprofit Council, an invitation-only, fee-based organization for senior-level executives in successful nonprofit organizations; USA for UNHCR; UNHCR; Save the Children; and UNICEF. In addition to an educational background in art history, literature, finance and non-profit management, Anne-Marie has obtained DiSC and Five Behaviors partner certification, and is a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach and International Coaching Federation credential trained coach, facilitator, author, and international speaker.

Bersabel Ephrem brings to the Management Board 32 years of experience in the areas of leadership, governance and public health policy and program management and has worked in several organizations within the Canadian Federal Government. Most recently, she served as the Director General of Centre of Communicable Diseases and Infection Control within the Public Health Agency of Canada. Prior to that, Bersabel served as the Senior Advisor to the Director General of the World Health Organization on management reform, where she provided leadership and oversight in the development of policies and institutionalized key governance initiatives. Bersabel has also served as Director General at the International Affairs Division of Health Canada. In this role, Bersabel led the Canadian delegation on several groundbreaking negotiations in WHO and the Pan American Health Organization. Her international experience includes serving as the Chair of APEC Health Task Force, head of the Secretariat for the Global Health Security Initiative and as the Vice Chair of the Board of Members at the Global Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Research and Development Hub, providing her with unique insights on the challenges global healthcare-focused organizations must navigate and on successful strategies to advance on their goals.

The breadth of skills possessed by the organization’s new and existing Management Board representatives are highly relevant to SNOMED International’s global membership structure and to the organization’s work developing SNOMED CT, a global terminology working to become the “one language of health” worldwide.

Joanne Burns, Chair of the Management Board since 2020, remarks on the importance of bringing together a group of individuals with a variety of perspectives and experience from across this organization’s many valued stakeholder groups. “Ms. Grey’s and Ms. Ephrem’s depth of experience and skills honed across multiple national and international organizations and sectors over many years will contribute significantly to the strategy, finance and risk acumen of the SNOMED International Management Board.”

SNOMED International CEO Don Sweete concurs. “Each of our new Management Board directors offers a suite of diverse strengths and highly relevant in-depth knowledge that will help move the organization forward,” he said. “I look forward to the positive impact they will have as they settle in and become integrated into the current Board.”

Ms. Grey and Ms. Ephrem, both appointed to a two-year term, join a strong group of six Management Board Directors: Joanne Burns, Chair; and Directors Dr. Matic Meglic; Dr. Gong Mengchun; Dr. Isabelle de Zegher; Professor Michael Lewis; and Dr. Andrew Roddam.

February 02, 2023, London, United Kingdom and Colorado, United States –- The Monarch Initiative has signed a five-year collaboration agreement with SNOMED International to develop maps from the clinical terminology SNOMED CT to Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO - a standardized vocabulary of phenotypic abnormalities encountered in human disease) and to HPO from SNOMED CT.
 
HPO is a flagship product of the Monarch Initiative, a U.S. National Institutes of Health-supported international consortium dedicated to semantic integration of biomedical and model organism data with the ultimate goal of improving biomedical research, and an integrative data and analytic platform connecting phenotypes to genotypes across species, bridging basic and applied research with semantics-based analysis. It is also a central component of one of the 13 driver projects in the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health strategic roadmap. 

As part of the agreement, the organizations will work together to develop mapping conventions by which both maps will be created, along with use cases. Both organizations will also collaborate on quality assurance, promoting the maps to their respective stakeholders and defining and agreeing upon an ongoing maintenance and updating process and policy for the developed maps.

Read the full announcement and contact info@snomed.org with inquiries. 

31 January 2023, Strasbourg, France, and London, United Kingdom -- SNOMED International and the European Directorate for the Quality of Medicines & HealthCare (EDQM), Council of Europe, have signed an agreement governing the creation, maintenance and distribution of a map between both organisations’ terminologies. The agreement came into effect in September 2022.

The agreement resulted from the need identified by SNOMED International’s Drug Extension User Support Group to align EDQM Standard Terms and SNOMED CT dose forms to serve specific use cases. It will focus on putting in place mechanisms for the release, maintenance and updating of the mapping between the lists of controlled terms in the EDQM Standard Terms database and the equivalent lists in SNOMED CT.

Both organisations will review the conditions of the agreement every five years. They will also ensure that the quality of the map being created under the agreement meets the needs of stakeholders, and will put in place plans to distribute, maintain and update it. Additionally, any new content that is needed to create the map will be included in regular SNOMED CT International Edition releases and made available by both parties. As the work develops, both organisations may also propose future collaborative activities based on emerging requirements in the European Union or elsewhere.

Read the full announcement and contact info@snomed.org with inquiries.