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: Open Source Terminology Server
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
- Ontoserver, CSIRO, Australia
- PHAST FHIR Terminology Server, France
- SNOMED CT Terminology Server, West Coast Informatics, US
- Snow Owl Terminology Server, B21 Healthcare
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