Effective Ways for the Transmission of Infection Prevention Data According to German Legal Specifications via the Medical Terminology SNOMED CT used with HL7 CDA Templates

According to German legal specifications each national federal state is obliged to transmit infection prevention data to the relevant health authority. In case of reasonable suspicion, affection or death by infectious diseases specific information is differently communicated by laboratories and physicians. Proprietary ways of transmission inherit threats like deficient or incomplete availability of data. At least these circumstances imply non-predictable health-related hazards for the population. The international established medical terminology SNOMED CT can contribute semantic interoperability and a highly specific description of diagnoses and procedures. The applicability of SNOMED CT shall be tested in the domain of diagnostic findings respective notifiable infectious agents. In addition, specific hierarchical links from the agents to the associated infectious diseases inside the terminology are expected and verified. As the carrier of the information, HL7's Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) is used by designing appropriate CDA templates to define the contents of the notifiable disease documentation. The results demonstrate that the entirety of the notifiable infectious agents is displayed in the terminology SNOMED CT by relating codes at 100 percent. Furthermore, each single term is hierarchically connected to the relating infectious diseases. The use of SNOMED CT for the purpose of infection prevention in Germany is tied to licensing and license costs. Irrespective of these facts, the use of SNOMED CT shows obvious advantages in this field and an implementation of the terminology can be recommended.