1 Introduction

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^®), trading as SNOMED International maintains the SNOMED CT technical design, the content architecture, the SNOMED CT content (includes the concepts table, the descriptions table, the relationships table, a history table, and ICD mappings), and related technical documentation.

2 Background

This document provides a summarized description of the content changes included in the March 2023 release of the SNOMED Clinical Terms^® Managed Service Denmark Extension package.

It will also includes technical notes detailing the known issues which have been identified (should any of these exist). These are content or technical issues where the root cause is understood, and the fix has been discussed and agreed, but has yet to be implemented.

This Denmark Extension package is dependent upon, and should therefore be consumed in conjunction with the SNOMED CT® February 2023 International Edition release.

2.1 Scope

This document is written for the purpose described above and is not intended to provide details of the technical specifications for SNOMED CT or encompass every change made during the release.

3 Content Development Activity

3.1 Summary

This release contains translation corrections and improvements to existing content as well as minor technical corrections made as a result of upgrading the extension to use the SNOMED CT® February 2023 International Edition release.

4 Technical notes

4.1 Known Issues

Known Issues are content or technical issues where the root cause is understood, and the resolution has been discussed and agreed, but has yet to be implemented.  This can be due to a number of reasons, from lack of capacity within the current editing cycle, to the risk of impact to the stability of SNOMED CT if the fix were to be deployed at that stage in the Product lifecycle.  

4.2 Resolved Issues

4.3  Notice of changes to the International Edition Release Schedule

As you may already know SNOMED International have transitioned to a monthly delivery schedule for the International Edition of SNOMED CT. The move towards more frequent releases of SNOMED CT realizes several benefits, including:

• The potential to be able to get content changes into the terminology in a shorter time frame.
• The fostering of better interoperability, as a result of entities being able to consume release content that is more aligned with other organizations.
• The prevention of circular dependencies that occur in longer projects, due to the move towards smaller, more manageable authoring projects.
• More automated validation services, as a result of the inherent removal of the Alpha/Beta stages in the Release cycle.

Whilst most users will continue unaffected (as they can simply continue to download the releases every 6 months as always), this transition necessarily involves a few changes to process/packages:

• Delta files have been removed from both International and Managed Service release packages, including the Denmark Extension.  A Delta Generation service will be provided for those who need it. The Delta Generation Tool allows users to create their own Delta between two fixed International release dates - you can find it here:
  • https://github.com/IHTSDO/delta-generator-tool/releases

• The ICD-0/ICD-10 Maps will continue to be published in each Monthly International Edition release package (in line with that month's content) for the foreseeable future, unless we experience issues with the new process in Production, and they need to be removed at a later date.

The first monthly Release of the SNOMED CT International Edition was published on the 28th February 2022 with the Delta files having been removed, and therefore they will be removed from the Denmark Extension from the March 2022 Release onwards.

Please note - While the SNOMED CT International Edition is moving to monthly releases, the Denmark Extension of SNOMED CT will remain on the current bi-annual release schedule of March and September.

4.4  Notice of change to deprecate the Danish Translated Concepts refset

The Danish Translated Concepts refset has not been maintained for a number of years and therefore after a review of the usefulness of the Danish Translated Concepts refset, it has been decided that it will no longer be published.  The deprecation process has been completed as follows:

• September 2022 - all records in the Danish Translated Concepts refset file were inactivated in this Denmark Extension Release package.
• September 2022 - notification was sent by the Danish NRC to all known users to warn them of the upcoming removal of the refset from the Denmark Extension Release package.
• March 2023         - all RF2 files for the Danish Translated Concepts refset file have now been permanently removed from the Denmark Extension Release package.
• March 2023 onwards - any users who wish to refer back to the Danish Translated Concepts refset can do so by referencing prior versions of the refset in the previous Denmark Extension Release packages.

The Danish Translated Concepts refset files have therefore been completed removed from the March 2023 DK Extension release package onwards, as planned as part of the deprecation process listed above.

For any further questions, please as the Denmark NRC for details.