The National Library of Medicine announces the release of the first version of the CORE (Clinical Observations Recording and Encoding) Subset of SNOMED CT (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine--Clinical Terms. The primary purpose of this Subset is to facilitate the use of SNOMED CT for coding of problem list data in Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and to enable more meaningful use of EHRs to improve patient safety, health care quality, and health information exchange. SNOMED CT is owned and maintained by the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO) and is a designated US standard terminology for diagnosis and problem lists. Use of SNOMED CT is free in IHTSDO Member countries, including the United States, in low income countries, and for approved research projects in any country. /

The CORE Problem List Subset of SNOMED CT was derived based on datasets submitted by seven large scale healthcare institutions. The most frequently used terms (covering 95% of usage volume) from these institutions are mapped to the corresponding SNOMED CT concepts where such concepts exist. The Subset contains about 5,000 SNOMED CT concepts and is described in detail at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/umls/Snomed/core_subset.html. NLM encourages input on how to improve the Subset to make it more useful to EHR developers, implementers, and users. Please send feedback to Dr. Kin Wah Fung, Lister Hill National Center for Biomedical Communications, National Library of Medicine.

The Subset is available at http://download.nlm.nih.gov/umls/kss/SNOMEDCT_CORE_SUBSET/SNOMEDCT_CORE_SUBSET_200907.zip. A free Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) Metathesaurus license (which includes the IHTSDO Affiliate license) is required. It can be obtained via the same site.