The Use of Automated SNOMED CT Clinical Coding in Clinical Decision Support Systems for Preventive Care.

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study is to discuss and analyze the use of automated SNOMED CT clinical coding in clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) for preventive care. The central question that this study seeks to answer is whether the utilization of SNOMED CT in CDSSs can improve preventive care.

METHOD: PubMed, Google Scholar, and Cochrane Library were searched for articles published in English between 2001 and 2012 on SNOMED CT, CDSS, and preventive care.

OUTCOME MEASURES: Outcome measures were the sensitivity or specificity of SNOMED CT coded data and the positive predictive value or negative predictive value of SNOMED CT coded data. Additionally, we documented the publication year, research question, study design, results, and conclusions of these studies.

RESULTS: The reviewed studies suggested that SNOMED CT successfully represents clinical terms and negated clinical terms.

CONCLUSION: The use of SNOMED CT in CDSS can be considered to provide an answer to the problem of medical errors as well as for preventive care in general. Enhancement of the modifiers and synonyms found in SNOMED CT will be necessary to improve the expected outcome of the integration of SNOMED CT with CDSS. Moreover, the application of the tree-augmented naïve (TAN) Bayesian network method can be considered the best technique to search SNOMED CT data and, consequently, to help improve preventive health services.