The SNOMED CT International General/Family Practice Reasons for Encounter and/or Health Issues reference set (hereafter called the GP/FP Subset) and the map from the GP/FP Subset to the International Classification of Primary Care (ICPC-2) were both developed between 2010 and 2013 by the GP/FP Subset and ICPC mapping project group. This project ended on December 31, 2013 after field-testing of the products was completed.
In December 2009 a harmonization agreement was finalized between SNOMED International and the World organisation of Family Doctors (Wonca) to promote co-operation and collaboration between the two organisations.
This agreement led to the formation of the International Family Physician/General Practitioner Special Interest Group (IFP/GP SIG) under the auspices of SNOMED International. The IFP/GP SIG was established to suggest content for the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine – Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT®) related to general/family practice and to provide quality assurance for SNOMED CT content from the general/family practice perspective. SNOMED International's existing Primary Care Special Interest Group was converted to the IFP/GP SIG after the agreement was signed.
The agreement contained a commitment to develop a mapping program, mapping relevant content in SNOMED CT to the International Classification of Primary Care, Version 2 (ICPC-2). Under the terms of the agreement, each task or project in the mapping program was to be managed by a mapping project group, comprised of members from the IFP/GP SIG, the WONCA International Classification Committee (WICC) and the SNOMED International's Mapping Special Interest Group. This project group was established in early 2010 and called the 'International GP/FP subset and ICPC mapping project group'.
The subsets were first released as a candidate baseline in April 2014. Changes to the structure of the subsets were made following feedback from this release.
As per Editorial policy concepts which are deemed semantically equivalent are not permitted and are inactivated as DUPLICATE. Correspondingly, in the July 2017 release of SNOMED CT, the following concepts were replaced:
Inactive ID | Inactivated | Active ID | Reason for inactivation | Active |
11925005 | Effects of reduced temperature (disorder) | 726523002 | POSSIBLY EQUIVALENT TO | Injury caused by low temperature (disorder) |
24988007 | Mesenteric vascular insufficiency (disorder) | 734041006 | POSSIBLY EQUIVALENT TO | Insufficiency of mesenteric artery (disorder) |
68525005 | Varicella vaccination (procedure) | 571611000119101 | SAME AS | Administration of varicella live vaccine (procedure) |
202852009 | Shoulder tendinitis (disorder) | 442520000 | POSSIBLY EQUIVALENT TO | Inflammation of rotator cuff tendon (disorder) |
239958005 | Painful arc syndrome (disorder) | 202841003 359532006 | POSSIBLY EQUIVALENT TO | Supraspinatus tendinitis (disorder) Rotator cuff impingement syndrome (disorder) |
270493009 | Paralysis of vocal cords or larynx (disorder) | 302912005 | POSSIBLY EQUIVALENT TO | Vocal cord palsy (disorder) |
428987008 | Subcutaneous contraceptive implant present (finding) | None | Reason not stated | NB: Replacement will be added for January 2018 |
Note: This document provides release information about the GP/FP subset. Release information about the map from the GP/FP subset to ICPC-2 can be found in the document July 2017 SNOMED CT to ICPC-2 mapping: Release notes.
The GP/FP subset contains SNOMED CT concepts relating to two semantic data types commonly used in general/family practice electronic health records:
A reason for encounter was defined as:
"An agreed statement of the reason(s) why a person enters the health care system, representing the demand for care by that person. The terms written down and later classified by the provider clarify the reason for encounter and consequently the patient's demand for care without interpreting it in the form of a diagnosis. The reason for encounter should be recognized by the patient as an acceptable description of the demand for care" (WONCA Dictionary of General/Family Practice, 2003).
A health issue was defined as:
"An Issue related to the health of a subject of care, as identified or stated by a specific health care party". This is further defined in the notes as "according to this definition, a health issue can correspond to a health problem, a disease, an illness" (Health Informatics – System of concepts to support continuity of care – Part 1: basic concepts (CEN/ISO FDIS 13940-1)).
These definitions were used to define the scope of the GP/FP subset. The subset contains SNOMED CT concepts that represent terms commonly used to populate these semantic data types.
The content of the subset covers the following:
Details on the development of the subset are available on request from info@snomed.org
Subsets act as the extensibility mechanism in SNOMED CT, allowing developers and users to customize SNOMED CT content to meet specific use cases.
Content for the general/family practice subset was initially provided by the SNOMED International's General/Family Practice and ICPC-2 mapping project group. It is designed for use in general/family practice clinical settings within electronic health records (EHRs). It is intended for use as the 'core' subset for two commonly used data fields — reasons for encounter and health issues.
To provide a subset of frequently used SNOMED CT concepts for use in general/family practice EHRs within the following data fields:
During an encounter in his/her general/family practice, a GP/FP sees a patient who has presented with a newly identified health issue. The GP/FP enters the new health issue into the data field for 'health issue', and into a problem list (if appropriate) in his/her EHR using the GP/FP subset that has been incorporated in his/her EHR by the EHR software vendor. The GP/FP is presented with a validated list of potential terms from the subset, from which he/she selects the SNOMED CT concept that best represents the patient's health issue.
A GP/FP wishes to transfer the care of a patient to a medical specialist for further investigation. The GP/FP's EHR contains the SNOMED CT GP/FP subset, and the GP/FP has entered all the patient's health issues into the EHR using the subset. An HL7 referral message is then constructed; containing SNOMED CT coded concepts from the patient's problem list. The message is sent electronically to the specialist who populates his/her EHR using the data contained in the message. This reduces the time needed to take a patient history and enter this data into the specialist's EHR.
A group of GPs are interested in comparing aspects of care across populations of GPs and their patients. The adoption of a subset will, to an extent, constrain the variability of coding of similar issues, conditions and situations that may confound data analysis where very large terminologies such as SNOMED CT are used without constraint.
Access within SNOMED International member countries is provided by the Member National Release Centre in each country, via the relevant Member page. Affiliates of SNOMED International in non-member countries can access the table through their Member Licensing and Distribution Service (MLDS) account. Please contact info@snomed.org for more information if required.
SNOMED CT is regarded as the leading global clinical terminology for use in EHRs. The GP/FP subset utilises the power of SNOMED CT by refining the subset to a list of concepts specific to those commonly used in General/Family practice. In this way assuring and enabling a SNOMED CT encoded system for recording aspects of the clinical record. This increases the usefulness of SNOMED CT for GPs/FPs because searches are targeted to the SNOMED CT concepts that GPs/FPs use most often, and, if implemented properly, users should be able to search and select a SNOMED CT concept quickly and easily.
As stated in Section 4.5, the SNOMED CT GP/FP subset will be maintained and distributed after (and in line with) each release of the SNOMED CT International Release.
The GP/FP Subset contains the following characteristics:
A series of principles for the development of the GP/FP subset were created during the development phase of the project. These principles are documented in the SNOMED CT GP/FP subset and ICPC mapping project: Phase 2 project report.
The GP/FP subset will be released using Release Format 2 (RF2) See Section 5.1 of the Technical Implementation Guide for further information about SNOMED CT release formats and RF2.
The GP/FP subset only contains SNOMED CT content from the following hierarchies:
The GP/FP subset was developed using a 'bottom-up' approach, based on the terms frequently used in general/family practice to describe reasons for encounter and health issues. As a result, it does not contain all the SNOMED CT concepts that could be used to populate the reasons for encounter or health issue data fields in electronic health records. The IFP/GP SIG will add to the content of the subset over time, but it is not intended that the subset will contain all SNOMED CT concepts that could be used to populate these data fields.
The SNOMED CT Technical Implementation Guide describes three implementation levels for some aspects of SNOMED CT deployment. The three levels represent incremental capabilities for implementation broken down into specific dimensions including scope of use, record structure, expression storage, data entry, data retrieval and communication. Guidance provided in this section of the Technical Implementation Guide is also applicable to implementation of the GP/FP subset.
It must be noted that the GP/FP subset does not inherently contain structures or content to support the implementation of post-coordinated expressions, as required for the highest implementation level within some dimensions. The decision to implement post-coordinated expressions must be made at the local level, with implementers choosing to allow users to created post-coordinated expressions in conjunction with use of the GP/FP subset.
Section 7.6 of the SNOMED CT Technical Implementation Guide provides recommendations and information for vendors about creating a user interface facilitating access to SNOMED CT concepts.
The GP/FP Subset contains concepts that are commonly used by GPs/FPs on an international basis, restricting the SNOMED CT concepts available to GPs/FPs to those concepts they are likely to use frequently. However, rare conditions are managed in general/family practice, and GPs/FPs may occasionally need to access a wider source of SNOMED CT concepts to populate their reasons for encounter or health issues.
For this reason, when implementing the GP/FP Subset implementers are strongly encouraged to implement a two-stage search mechanism, where users search for concepts in the GP/FP Subset in the first instance. Then, if a suitable concept cannot be found in the GP/FP Subset, a 'secondary search' is activated, allowing the search to be repeated using a broader set of relevant SNOMED CT concepts.
The subset is aligned to the July 2017 SNOMED CT International Release. The effectiveTime for the content has therefore been set to 20170731 (31st July 2017).
Agreement of changes to both products will have clinical oversight by the International Family Practice/General Practice SIG (IFP/GP SIG).
Requests for future changes will be accepted through the SNOMED International Request submission process or info@snomed.org.
The RF2 package convention dictates that it contains all relevant files, regardless of whether or not there is content to be included in each particular release. Therefore, the package contains a mixture of files which contain both header rows and content data, and also files that are intentionally left blank (including only a header record). The reason that these files are not removed from the package is to draw a clear distinction between:
This allows users to easily distinguish between files that have purposefully been removed or not, as otherwise if files in option 2 above were left out of the package it could be interpreted as an error, rather than an intentional lack of content in that release.
Approvals
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Draft Amendment History
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