SNOMED CT as reference terminology in the Danish national home care documentation standard

In Danish home care, multiple professions deliver services to citizens. FSIII is a national home care documentation standard, where one of the goals is to share documentation to improve coordination between these professional groups and avoid double documentation. The aim of this study was to develop a SNOMED-CT based navigation hierarchy to ensure that professions could preserve their documentation practice, to help avoid double documentation, and to ensure that the technical implementation did not require sophisticated semantic tools. The method involved mapping of non-SNOMED-CT content to SNOMED CT, visualization of merged graphs, identification of reference concepts, relating reference concepts to the documentation models of each profession, and representation of the navigation hierarchy in a reference set. The navigation hierarchy ensures that citizen conditions appear in a relevant context, regardless of which profession entered the data. Our approach paves the way for incremental standardization projects, where an implementation artefact, such as the navigation hierarchy, highlights the semantic features of SNOMED CT that can be used to reach specific business goals; in this case, sharing data across professional groups.