National Clinical Terminology Service (NCTS)

Introduction

The National Clinical Terminology Service (NCTS), manages, develops, and distributes clinical terminologies and tools to support Australia's digital health needs. This includes serving as the Australian National Release Centre for SNOMED CT on behalf of SNOMED International.

NCTS Overview 

The NCTS’s terminology solutions include SNOMED CT-AU and the Australian Medicines Terminology (AMT).

Users have access to tools and services such as: 

• National Terminology server
• National Syndication Server
• Online browser (Shrimp)
• Mapping platform (Snapper)
• Ontoserver
• Comprehensive resource library
• Recording - Introduction to the NCTS products and services

For detailed information visit https://www.healthterminologies.gov.au.

SNOMED CT-AU

SNOMED CT is the most comprehensive multilingual health terminology in the world used to facilitate the structured representation of clinical terms within computer systems. It includes concepts covering clinical findings, procedures, observables, body structures, organisms, substances, and pharmaceutical/biologic products and more.

SNOMED CT-AU is the Australian edition of SNOMED CT, and includes localised information for core SNOMED CT concepts, along with additional reference sets that are relevant to specific Australian use cases.

Updated monthly, SNOMED CT-AU is available for free to SNOMED CT and Australian National Terminology licence holders in several formats:

• SNOMED International Release Format 2 (RF2) as Full, Snapshot and Delta release files
• HL7 FHIR standard value sets (which may also be obtained via the Integration Interface of the National Terminology Server)
• TSV format reference sets (containing concept ID, Fully Specified Name, Preferred Term and Synonym description only)

Australian Medicines Terminology (AMT)

The AMT, is a formal subset of SNOMED CT-AU, providing unique codes and terminology for accurately describing all commonly used medicines in Australia. It supports electronic medicine management in clinical systems, including prescribing, recording, reviewing, dispensing, administering, and information transfer.

The AMT is updated monthly to reflect the latest changes and additions to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods.  

AMT is available for free to SNOMED CT and Australian National Terminology licence holders as part of the SNOMED CT-AU release.

Open Source Software

The Agency offers an open-source repository on Github, for developers to access and collaborate on software libraries and tools for implementing terminology solutions.

Examples of resources include: 

• Hotspot – a web site that sits in front of a FHIR terminology server and provides a human-friendly rendering
• Sctau sample scripts – Sample relational database load scripts and SQL queries for processing SNOMED CT-AU RF2 release files
• SNOMED OWL toolkit – The official SNOMED CT OWL Toolkit. OWL conversion, classification and authoring support
• Medserve – FHIR Medication server that makes it easy to make medicines terminology content available as a local service

Detailed information on the Github repository is available at: https://github.com/AuDigitalHealth.