SNOMED CT's release format, RF2, and its content can undoubtedly be improved to allow richer/better/easier use through terminology services.

This page (and subpages if they are warranted) is designed to capture these initiatives so they may be documented and communicated to the appropriate group in SNOMED International for action. These initiatives may become obvious through review and revision of the Using SNOMED CT with FHIR page or other work of the group.

Examples to start with are

  1. The Using SNOMED CT with FHIR page defines Implicit ValueSets however there is no way to GET an implicit ValueSet resource which would be a good way to expose metadata about a reference set (for example name, title, status, description, publisher, purpose, copyright, intensional definition...etc). This metadata for reference sets currently has no place in RF2, however is useful generally and usually gets documented outside the terminology and has been the topic of other discussion (and even others too). This suggestion is to work on defining a set of metadata attributes and their location in RF2 so they may be exposed by services like implicit ValueSets and online documentation generated from RF2 files rather than maintained separately.
  2. Reference sets that represent maps in SNOMED CT can be represented as Implicit ConceptMaps in FHIR. However one missing part of the metadata which accompanies SNOMED CT reference sets operating as maps is they fail to identify the code system the map is to - it is obvious to a human reading the name of the reference set, but for the purposes of writing software you "just have to know" the target code system and hard code that for the particular reference sets as assumptions. Clearly this would be better as machine processable metadata and would help with realising Implicit ConceptMaps in FHIR which are quite useful. This may be a specialised case of point 1 above, however this focusses on machine used metadata as opposed to metadata for human consumption.

Please indicate if there is interest in working on the above items, and/or other suggested items.