A rapid and effective way of deploying SNOMED CT in a national or local implementation is to use SNOMED CT terminology servers. SNOMED CT terminology servers simplify Implementing a central solution that provides access to all the SNOMED CT content and features, a SNOMED CT Terminology Server, is the most common implementation architecture. It simplifies the development of clinical applications that consume these use SNOMED CT, by providing optimized terminology services through an APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). Terminology services may include:

• Searching for SNOMED CT content using term matching, the hierarchy, or defining relationships (see Snowstorm Search Guide),
• Retrieving information about a given concept, including descriptions for a given dialect, supertypes, subtypes and defining relationships,
• Executing Expression Constraint Queries (ECL) on a particular SNOMED CT edition, and
• Accessing maps to/from SNOMED CT and other reference set information.

Terminology servers can either import data from a SNOMED CT release package, or periodically synchronise its content with another terminology server. The loaded SNOMED CT content can then be made The terminology servers can import data from the SNOMED CT release packages and make the information available to browsers or electronic medical health records with using a convenient APIs API that implement implements terminology best practices in terminology management, including search and sorting algorithms, support for ECL, language filters, hierarchy navigation, etc. Using terminology servers saves the time of implementing these features from scratch starting from the plain text files, and they can provide standardized APIs that simplify the integration into en user applications.

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. Using a terminology server in your implementation can save time, by removing the need to implement these services from scratch. The use of standardized APISs can also simplify their integration into end user applications.

To learn more about using terminology services, please enrol in our SNOMED CT Terminology Services Course (free for Members).

Snowstorm

SNOMED International develops and maintains Snowstorm, a SNOMED CT terminology server built on top of Elasticsearch, with a focus on performance and enterprise scalability. Snowstorm provides the terminology server API for the a range of SNOMED CT tools used by SNOMED International Browser , including the SNOMED CT Browser and the SNOMED CT Authoring Platform.

International Edition and around fourteen national Extensions. As an open-source tool, Snowstorm can be installed locally to provide a terminology services API to clinical applications..

• Source code: https://github.com/IHTSDO/snowstorm
• Snowstorm Test Instance - Native API: https://snowstorm.snomedtools.org/snowstorm/snomed-ct
• Snowstorm Test Instance - FHIR API: https://snowstorm.snomedtools.org/fhir/
  • NB the Test Instance must not be used in production clinical systems! It has rate limiting and no SLA.

The main features of Snowstorm includeMain features of Snowstorm:

• Open source, based on a modern open-source stack, Elasticsearch, Spring Boot, Docker
• Advanced SNOMED specific API
• Read-only HL7 FHIR API
• Multi-lingual search and content retrieval
• Fully ECL v1v2.3 0 compliant
• Full history (depends on full RF2 import)
• Supports a Read-only mode and an Authoring mode

Snowstorm source repository is available at: https://github.com/IHTSDO/snowstorm

Other terminology servers

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To deploy Snowstorm in a clinical system, please visit the Snowstorm Github repository to learn how to install your own local instance.

Other Terminology Servers

Other SNOMED CT terminology servers are available, as listed below. Please note that these terminology servers may use different licensing models and APIs (e.g. a standard HL7 FHIR API, or a proprietary API).

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If you are aware of other terminology servers available that support SNOMED CT, or if you see any errors in this listing, please let us know using the feedback This list of terminology servers is provided in alphabetical order. To request the addition or removal of a terminology servers to/from this list, please submit a request via the 'Feedback' button at the bottom of the this page.