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• Organizations must only generate new SCTIDs for components using a namespace identifier assigned to them by SNOMED International
• Organizations must have a mechanism in place to ensure that each SCTID is assigned only once. Generally, a single authority that generates item-identifiers in a sequential fashion for each type of component will achieve this goal.
• Generally, SCTID should be generated for new components as part of the release process for an Extension, rather than during the edit process. This is to avoid unnecessary usage of Identifiers for Concepts that are created during editing but found not to be required prior to release.
• item-identifiers should not be generated so as to have meaning. They should be regarded as meaningless numbers. (Recall that an item identifier precedes the namespace identifier in an SCTID.)

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Thus, anyone can create a UUID and use it to identify something with near certainty that the identifier does not duplicate one that has already been, or will be, created to identify something else. Information labeled with UUIDs by independent parties can, therefore, be later combined into a single database, or transmitted on the same channel, without needing to resolve conflicts between identifiers.

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