SNOMED Update September 2021

The implementation of SNOMED CT is mandated by law (Section 250 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012, issued on 2 November 2016). “Secondary care, acute care, mental health, community systems, dentistry and other systems used in direct patient care must use SNOMED CT as the clinical terminology by 1 April 2020”

SNOMED will become a mandatory requirement for NHS codes on 1st September 2021.

Turn SNOMED On/Off

Snomed can now be easily turned on or off on the practice settings window accessed from the configure menu. Whilst this is currently only mandated for NHS England region practices, it can be turned on in other NHS regions if desired.

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NHS Courses Only

SNOMED will now only be requested when charting NHS courses of treatment. Providers can still add SNOMED codes to other treatment, but this is outside the normal workflow. If your practice wants to be prompted to apply SNOMED codes to non NHS treatments this can be enabled by changing the setting
snomed.NHSonly to '0'.

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Add New SNOMED codes

In addition to the list of SNOMED codes originally suggested by the NHS, Exact now allows practice to add their own choices of codes to map to a service. This is done through the ‘Configure SNOMED’ button on the edit service window.

To Add codes click on the Add/Edit Codes button in the bottom left if the code you want is not in the list.

Use the search bar to find your code, but if it doesn’t exist click on the Create SNOMED Code button.

The link in text will take you to the SNOMED CT library where you can browse all of the available codes. When you find the code you want to use copy its code and description into the appropriate fields. You can also give it a type to help with searching later.

Save the SNOMED code and it will be placed in the list for you to map to your service.

Later if you want to amend the description or type click on the ed button next to the code to change it. You can also delete the code if it was added in error.