Blog from July, 2025

SNOMED International, along with a team of research and technology focused subject matter experts, recently contributed to a research paper documenting the development of entity linking models to link spans of free-text data in clinical notes with specific topics in the clinical terminology SNOMED CT. The paper, which had been planned as part of the competition, was recently published in the highly respected, peer-reviewed Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, the outcomes of which were derived from SNOMED International’s Entity Linking Challenge held in 2024.

The SNOMED CT Entity Linking Challenge, which ran from January to March 2024, trained machine learning models to link clinical notes with specific topics based on the largest publicly available dataset of labeled clinical notes that had been de-identified and annotated with SNOMED CT concepts. It was supported by platform host partner DrivenData, which hosts online data science competitions; AI consultancy Veratai; Physionet, the Research Resource for Complex Physiologic Signals, and an annotation team.

The paper, which was co-authored by SNOMED International, Veratai and the winning teams of the competition, describes the basis of the work – a large set of 74,808 annotations curated across 272 discharge notes spanning 6,624 unique clinical concepts – and the evaluation process. It compares the approaches used by the winning solutions and highlights the most challenging factors affecting clinical entity linking models. It also describes the data set and the policy-based approach to the development of the “ground truth” data set and provides an example of its approach to scoring. Importantly, it analyzes the reasons for low-scoring concepts, and details a number of lessons learned.

Read the release here.

SNOMED International salutes the State of the World’s Nursing 2025, a recently released report that provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of the global nursing workforce.

Framed in the context of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, an “action plan for people, the planet and prosperity,” the nursing report confirms that the 12 policy priorities of the World Health Organization (WHO) Global strategic directions for nursing and midwifery 2025 remain highly relevant for the period 2026-2030. It also identifies five emerging policy priorities in the areas of advanced practice nursing, gender equality, digital health and technology, the climate agenda, and nurses in situations of war and conflict.

According to the report, nurses –  the largest occupational group in the healthcare sector with about 28 million practitioners worldwide –  “must be prepared and fully supported to competently utilize digital technologies across areas of professional practice from education to practice, research and management."

SNOMED International has long supported this goal, initially informally, and then more formally beginning in 2020, when SNOMED International and the International Council of Nurses (ICN) announced an agreement to work together to integrate the International Classification for Nursing Practice (ICNP) into SNOMED CT in a systematic way. The formal collaboration followed ICN’s review of its role in health informatics globally, enabling them to develop a strategy for supporting nursing globally.

“The inclusion of nursing content in SNOMED CT greatly augments its value and utility,” says SNOMED International CEO Don Sweete. “It also supports the level of granularity nursing needs while connecting the profession to the broader healthcare community.”

Read the release here.

Our most recent podcast is now available! This one, moderated by Kelly Kuru, features Ole Våge, chair of SNOMED International’s Translation User Group and a terminologist at the Helsedirektoratet; Feikje Hielkema-Raadsveld, computational linguist at Nictiz, a Dutch knowledge organization for digital information provision in healthcare; and Kai Kewley, a technical specialist for SNOMED International's Implementation Support Team. It examines the growing importance of translation in the SNOMED CT world as more countries whose first language is not English become Members and as our global stakeholder community continues to grow, focusing on new approaches, technologies and tools to tackle this challenging issue. You can listen to it at this link https://coded-conversations-episode-1.simplecast.com/episodes/translating-snomed-ct-new-tools-tactics-and-approaches or search for Coded Conversations on your favourite podcast platform. Stay tuned for part 2 of the conversation as we delve more deeply into translation tools!