SNOMED CT was published as an information standard by the Information Standards Board in August 2011; this version details amendments to both the published standard and the dates for implementation.

SNOMED CT is an international clinical terminology that provides the vocabulary for IT systems to support the direct management of the health and care of an individual.

It also enables the representation of clinically relevant information consistently and reliably in a way that can be processed by IT systems. This enables IT systems to exchange data across the health and care environment; provide clinical decision support tools and undertake enhanced analytics to support effective delivery of high quality healthcare to individual people and populations.

SNOMED CT is required to be used for communicating clinical content across health and care within the NHS standard contracts and is also stated as the required terminology to support direct management of care within the policy document published by the National Information Board (NIB): Personalised Health and Care 2020: A Framework for Action.

About this change

SNOMED CT is the only current information standard for clinical terminology and this change seeks to ensure its implementation is planned to coincide with national requirements in relation to electronic records. There are three elements to the change:

1. Confirmation of the timescales for the cessation of SNOMED CT releases in Release Format 1 (RF1) and the subsequent move to releases only being provided in Release Format 2 (RF2). All existing users (including any social care providers) will need to change to RF2.
2. Conversion of the current information standard to align with the requirements of the Health and Social Care Act 2012. This includes the provision of Implementation Guidance.
3. Confirmation of application of this standard in specified operational settings including implementation dates in alignment with national policy.

Existing users need to be aware that SNOMED CT will be required to be incorporated into any future information standards that require consistent recording and interoperability of clinically related data items.

Implementation dates

All Current users (including any social care users) of SNOMED CT in Release Format 1 (RF1) must move to SNOMED CT in Release Format 2 (RF2) no later than 1 October 2018.

Providers of health and care are required to be paperless at the point of care before 2020: supporting IT systems must incorporate SNOMED CT as the clinical terminology.

The following is a summary of conformance dates for appropriate implementation of SNOMED CT that all providers and standards developers must be aware of when planning new, or making changes to existing IT systems or relevant operational information standards:

• Systems used by, or communicating coded clinical data to, General Practice service providers must use SNOMED CT as the clinical terminology within the system before 1 April 2018. SNOMED CT must be utilised in place of the READ codes before 1 April 2018.
• Systems used within Secondary Care, Acute Care, Mental Health Services, Community Services, Dentistry and Optometry - for the direct management of care of an individual - must use SNOMED CT as the clinical terminology standard within all electronic patient level recording and communications before 1 April 2020.
• Systems used by all other providers of health related services where the flow of information for the direct management of patient care comes into the NHS must use SNOMED CT by 1 April 2020.

Mandated dates for implementation in social care are expected to be part of a future update of the standard.