Dear all

An opportunity has been identified to modify the Release schedule for the SNOMED CT International Edition package.  Currently the monthly Release is published on the final day of the month, which is not ideal as this date changes every month.  The current process has also caused some issues with certain extension releases when concepts are promoted to the International Edition before they are officially published. This introduced duplicates into Extensions as the concepts were published on the same date.  There is no way to extend the automated validation to cover this scenario, as the two packages are completely distinct, due to the relevant Extension releases being dependent on International Edition packages from before the invalid promotion occurred.

This can be mitigated to a large extent by moving the release date to the 1st of each month, as there are far fewer Extension releases that are published on the 1st than on the last day of the month.  In addition, this new approach standardises the effectiveTimes and package naming conventions to be the 1st of each month instead of 28th/30th/31st.

The proposed plan is to transition to this new process in Q3 of 2023, however we will keep you informed of any changes to this schedule as the year progresses. 

When the transition occurs, we will not publish two monthly releases on subsequent days - so for example we would not publish the July 2023 release on 31st July and then move to the first of the month schedule on the 1st August, as there would be no useful changes to publish. Instead, we would publish the July 2023 release on 31st July and then move the August 2023 release to the 1st September.

If you have any concerns or questions on these proposed changes, please let us know on release@snomed.org, or by responding to this message directly.

Kind regards, 

Andrew Atkinson  |  Release Manager