Practical Guide to Reference Sets

SNOMED CT provides the core clinical terminology for electronic health records. It contains more than 300,000 active concepts with unique meanings, which are organised into hierarchies and have formal logic-based definitions. When implemented in software applications, SNOMED CT can be used to represent clinically relevant information consistently, reliably and comprehensively. Due to the comprehensiveness and expressivity of SNOMED CT, it is often useful to constrain its use to a subset of concepts, descriptions or relationships relevant to a particular use case. SNOMED CT reference sets provide a standard way to represent subsets of SNOMED CT components. Reference sets also provide an extensible mechanism to customise the terminology to meet a wide range of practical requirements. This user guide provides a high-level introduction to SNOMED CT reference sets and explains the different types of reference sets and their usage. It also introduces the reference set format and provides guidance on the development and management of reference sets.

Main sections:

· Subsets, value sets and reference sets

· Requirements and use cases

· Reference set design

· Reference set types

· Reference set development

· Appendix A: Overview of reference set types

· Appendix B: Deprecated reference set types

· Previous versions

· Recent updates