Recording Associated Disorders Using SNOMED CT

Multidisciplinary communication about patients with multiple and often interrelated diseases is of utmost importance to guarantee high quality of care. In this paper we focus on storing into the electronic medical record patients' disorders which are associated with each other, taking into account the role of SNOMED CT. The objectives of this paper are to design and discuss possibilities to appropriately record the associations between two disorders as defined in SNOMED CT and to get insight into the use of the relationship “associated with” in SNOMED CT and its consequences for data reuse. Our study showed that textual and concept-based reproducible recording of reusable data is hampered due to incorrect or incomplete modeling of associations between disorders in SNOMED CT. A possible solution for this is to record constituting characteristics of concepts directly into the record, instead of only being represented in the terminology. Further research on binding of information models and terminologies is needed.