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Introduction

The SNOMED CT terminology provides a common language that enables a consistent way of indexing, storing, retrieving, and aggregating clinical data across specialties and sites of care. The International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO^®) maintains the SNOMED CT technical design, the content architecture, the SNOMED CT content (including the concepts table, the descriptions table, the relationships table, a history table and ICD mappings), and related technical documentation. 

This document is intended to give a brief description, background context, explanatory notes on the SNOMED CT International Drugs and Substances project and the resulting Content Preview Release package, which will be published on 9-Feb, 2018 and as needed throughout the current release cycle. every 6 months. 

Audience for this document

This document should be read by all those who will be reviewing or submitting questions or comments related tot he Content Preview, including participation in any follow up meetings.  (National Release Centers, vendors of electronic health records, terminology developers and regulators) with an interest in the usage of Drugs content in SNOMED CT. 

Background

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 Scope and Purpose

The scope of the SNOMED CT International Drugs and Substances project was ............. PHUONG - please fill in using language from monthly reports.

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Release content

Overview

The Drugs content is released under a project-specific module ...............PHUONG - no idea what "project-specific module" means.

Content detail

Detailed documentation regarding changes to the Substance and Drug hierarchies that are in scope to be reviewed for this Content Preview are located on the project Confluence sites:

Drug Model Working Group - Directory

Reference Documentation - Substances

Please note that comments and questions submitted related to content not specifically identified as in scope for this Content Preview will be rejected.

Language preferences - PHUONG - no idea what goes here.

Effective date - This section seems wrong; I'm not sure that the date of the snapshot matters to reviewers.

The content in the January 2018 Drugs and Substances package has been updated in line with the January 2018 SNOMED CT International Edition package have therefore been assigned the value of 20180131 in the effectiveTime field. 

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Technical Notes

RF2 package format

The RF2 package convention dictates that it contains all relevant files, regardless of whether or not there is content to be included in each particular release.  Therefore, the package contains a mixture of files which contain both header rows and content data, and also files that are intentionally left blank (including only a header record).  The reason that these files are not removed from the package is to draw a clear distinction between:

1. ...files that have been deprecated (and therefore removed from the package completely), due to the content no longer being relevant to RF2 in this or future releases, and 
2. ...files that just happen to contain no data in this particular release (and are therefore included in the package but left blank, with only a header record), but are still relevant to RF2, and could therefore potentially contain data in future releases.

This allows users to easily distinguish between files that have purposefully been removed or not, as otherwise if files in option 2 above were left out of the package it could be interpreted as an error, rather than an intentional lack of content in that release.