4. Learning Options

The SNOMED CT for Developers learning pathway can be customized to meet your learning needs. The recommended learning options are explained below.

Firstly we recommend that all developers of SNOMED CT enabled applications should be familiar with the material covered in the first two topics - Introduction and SNOMED CT Essentials

The last three topics – SpecificationsTerminology Services and Record Services – contain education materials that focuses on different aspects of clinical software systems. You can therefore be more selective as to which education materials are relevant to the system you are developing. For example, your software implementation may:

  • Focus on developing a SNOMED CT enabled terminology service, either to support an Electronic Health Record system, or to support the development of tools for authoring and managing a SNOMED CT extension. In this case, the Terminology Services and Specifications topics may be of particular interest to you.
  • Use an existing terminology service, and build a health record application on top that allows clinical data to be entered, stored, retrieved, displayed and in some cases exchanged with other health record applications. In this case, the Record Services topic, and the Reference Sets and Computable Languages sections under the Specifications topic may be of particular interest to you.
  • Implement clinical decision support rules or patient-specific links to clinical guidelines. These features may also be integrated within a health record application to provide runtime clinical decision support. In this case, the Clinical Decision Support and Computable Languages sections may be of particular interest to you.
  • Integrate data collected from other systems to provide reporting and data analytics capabilities. In this case, the Data Analytics and Computable Languages sections may be of particular interest to you.

There are also many new and novel applications of SNOMED CT that are not included in the list above. If this applies to your software application, then please feel free to select the education material that is most relevant to your implementation.