This is a preprint, a preliminary version of a manuscript that has not completed peer review at a journal. Research Square does not conduct peer review prior to posting preprints. The posting of a preprint on this server should not be interpreted as an endorsement of its validity or suitability for dissemination as established information or for guiding clinical practice.
Research Article
Jens Hüsers
Hochschule Osnabrück
Corresponding Author
License:
This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 License. Read Full License
Background: Chronic health conditions are on the rise and are putting high economic pressure on health systems as they require well-coordinated prevention and treatment. Among chronic conditions, chronic wounds such as cardiovascular leg ulcers have a high prevalence. The interdisciplinary and multiorganisational character of wound care demands interoperable information exchange that can be achieved by using international semantic standards such as SNOMED CT. This study, therefore, aimed to investigate the expressiveness of SNOMED CT in this medical domain, and thereby its clinical usefulness and the potential need for its extension.
Methods: In this study, a consented wound care item set, the National Consensus for the Documentation of Leg Wounds (NKDUC), was mapped to the international reference terminology SNOMED CT. In order to derive the relevant items of the wound domain, an information model was developed that served as the foundation for the mapping. The mapping itself was guided by the procedural formalism of ISO TR 12300. As a result, the reliability, equivalence and coverage rate were determined.
Results: The developed information model revealed 268 items to be mapped. Conducted by three health care professionals, the mapping resulted in “moderate” reliability (K=0.512). Regarding a symmetric match, the coverage rate of SNOMED CT was 67.2% overall, and 64.3% specifically for wounds.
Conclusion: The results show acceptable reliability values. The overall coverage rate shows that two-thirds of the items found a symmetric map, which is a substantial portion of the source item set. As the differences in the coverage rates between different wound care sections demonstrate, some areas, such as “general medical condition” and “wound assessment”, in particular, were covered better than other areas (“wound status”, “diagnostics” and “therapy”). These deficiencies can be mitigated either by post-coordination or the inclusion of new terms in SNOMED CT. In general, this study adds another puzzle piece to the general knowledge about SNOMED CT in terms of its clinical usefulness and its need for further extensions.
Keywords
wound care, chronic wound, chronic leg ulcer, SNOMED CT, health information exchange, semantic interoperability
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This is a preprint, a preliminary version of a manuscript that has not completed peer review at a journal. Research Square does not conduct peer review prior to posting preprints. The posting of a preprint on this server should not be interpreted as an endorsement of its validity or suitability for dissemination as established information or for guiding clinical practice.
Research Article
Jens Hüsers
Hochschule Osnabrück
Corresponding Author
Badges
Prescreen
This manuscript passed our Prescreen assessment
Complete author information
Appropriate declaration statements
Potential risks to human health
Prescreen
History
CURRENT STATUS: Posted
Version 1
Posted 30 Dec, 2020
No community comments so far
Metrics
Comments: 0
PDF Downloads: ...
HTML Views: ...
Subject Areas
Medical Informatics
License:
This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 License. Read Full License
Background: Chronic health conditions are on the rise and are putting high economic pressure on health systems as they require well-coordinated prevention and treatment. Among chronic conditions, chronic wounds such as cardiovascular leg ulcers have a high prevalence. The interdisciplinary and multiorganisational character of wound care demands interoperable information exchange that can be achieved by using international semantic standards such as SNOMED CT. This study, therefore, aimed to investigate the expressiveness of SNOMED CT in this medical domain, and thereby its clinical usefulness and the potential need for its extension.
Methods: In this study, a consented wound care item set, the National Consensus for the Documentation of Leg Wounds (NKDUC), was mapped to the international reference terminology SNOMED CT. In order to derive the relevant items of the wound domain, an information model was developed that served as the foundation for the mapping. The mapping itself was guided by the procedural formalism of ISO TR 12300. As a result, the reliability, equivalence and coverage rate were determined.
Results: The developed information model revealed 268 items to be mapped. Conducted by three health care professionals, the mapping resulted in “moderate” reliability (K=0.512). Regarding a symmetric match, the coverage rate of SNOMED CT was 67.2% overall, and 64.3% specifically for wounds.
Conclusion: The results show acceptable reliability values. The overall coverage rate shows that two-thirds of the items found a symmetric map, which is a substantial portion of the source item set. As the differences in the coverage rates between different wound care sections demonstrate, some areas, such as “general medical condition” and “wound assessment”, in particular, were covered better than other areas (“wound status”, “diagnostics” and “therapy”). These deficiencies can be mitigated either by post-coordination or the inclusion of new terms in SNOMED CT. In general, this study adds another puzzle piece to the general knowledge about SNOMED CT in terms of its clinical usefulness and its need for further extensions.
Figure 1
This is a list of supplementary files associated with this preprint. Click to download.
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