SNOMED Strikes Partnership to Support Healthcare Research Opportunities

SNOMED International announced a five-year partnership with the non-profit global research collaborative Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) to open new opportunities for healthcare research communities.

OHDSI, coordinated by the Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics, provides open-source solutions to enable the analysis and sharing of healthcare and observational data. Its mission is to “improve health by empowering a community to collaboratively generate the evidence that promotes better health decisions and better care,” according to the press release.

OHDSI’s common data model, Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP), utilizes SNOMED Clinical Terms (CT) as a core terminology, which allows the use of other terminology and classification models through computable linkages.

The collaboration with SNOMED provides OHDSI and its users with comprehensive conceptualizations of healthcare areas and content, such as social determinants of health (SDOH), devices, and disease severity scores. OHDSI will also have access to better concept definitions used in large-scale research. As OHDSI users utilize these resources, they can provide SNOMED with information related to clinical validation, frequency of use data, and validation of SNOMED CT content modeling.

The collaboration is part of SNOMED International’s member-and stakeholder-driven five-year strategy, which includes genomic content collaboration and engagement with the research community as major goals.

“Both OHDSI and SNOMED International are working towards creating a healthcare environment that provides both patients and clinicians the real-world evidence needed to make informed and important decisions,” said George Hripcsak, the Vivian Beaumont Allen professor and chair of Columbia University’s Department of Biomedical Informatics, in the press release. “SNOMED plays a critical role by delivering the comprehensive health terminologies necessary for OHDSI to generate reliable and reproducible evidence. Our community is thrilled to formalize this partnership so we can continue this important work.”

Though OHDSI and SNOMED have been working together informally for the past few years, formalizing the partnership allows additional opportunities and benefits for both parties, enabling them to further their efforts.

As part of the formal partnership, representatives from both organizations will collaborate to produce joint work and highlight areas of clinical and informatics research that benefit from each organization’s products. Currently, both parties are developing an initial two-year work plan that includes:

• Use of SNOMED CT for research and analytics
• Evidence of benefits of SNOMED CT in use
• SNOMED CT and derivative quality improvement
• Content collaboration
• Open engagement between clinical and research communities between the two organizations
• Joint communications regarding the collaboration and work

Through the collaboration, SNOMED CT will be available to all OHDSI users for use in its products. Additionally, SNOMED International will work with OHDSI to provide SNOMED CT Development Licenses to users in non-member countries.