Laboratory specialists needed to help develop SNOMED CT

NHS England and the Department of Health and Social Care has invited laboratory experts, pathologists and biomedical scientists, for help developing and checking SNOMED CT terminology for lab diagnostics and test reporting. Every year around 1.4 billion test result codes go from labs to GP systems, making up about 35% of all coded patient data. Much of that still runs on ageing Read Codes (PBCL), which can be ambiguous, out of date and hard for machines to read consistently.

Moving to SNOMED CT and FHIR-based messaging should fix a lot of that, but only if the people who actually run these tests get involved. NHS England is looking for input across chemistry, haematology, microbiology, immunology and transfusion medicine, checking which SNOMED CT concepts are missing or don't match how tests are actually done. Distinctions such as mass versus molar concentration, or serum versus plasma, matter here. Get them wrong in the coding and it changes how a result gets read downstream.

There's also work mapping local and legacy codes, including LIMS and middleware codes, to SNOMED CT PaLM, and checking that mapping holds up in practice.

You can get involved through the Pathology and Laboratory Medicine (PaLM) Informatics Expert Reference Group, which meets to work through terminology and mapping questions. Joining isn't compulsory, and if regular meetings aren't realistic, one-off input is still welcome.

This is voluntary and NHS England is hoping to reach people for whom this kind of work naturally sits within their day job, across pathology networks and health boards in all four nations. If that's you, or someone on your team, it's a chance to shape terminology that touches nearly all coded patient data in the NHS.

Contact Karim Nashar, terminology design specialist, at [email protected], or Karen Mitchell, chair of the Pathology Informatics Committee, at [email protected] to find out more or register your interest.