SNOMED CT Terminology Services provide an effective way of implementing SNOMED CT by enabling SNOMED CT content to be searched and queried via an API (application programming interface).

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 terminology services through APIs.

The terminology servers can import data from the SNOMED CT release packages and make the information available to browsers or electronic medical records with convenient APIs that implement 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.

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 SNOMED International Browser including the 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.

Main 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 v1.3 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

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 FHIR APIs or a proprietary API).

Please note that 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 this page.