In this Issue HL7 News

HL7 News • ASSESS CT – Second Validation Workshop in the Heart of Berlin
By Reza
Fathollah-Nejad,
MA, Faculty
of Healthcare,
Competence
Center eHealth,
Niederrhein
University of
Applied Sciences
Heike Dewenter,
MSc, Faculty
of Healthcare,
Competence
Center eHealth,
Niederrhein
University of
Applied Sciences
By Sylvia Thun,
MD, PhD, Faculty
of Healthcare,
Director of the
Competence
Center eHealth,
Niederrhein
University of
Applied Sciences
Assessing SNOMED CT for large scale eHealth deployments in the EU
ASSESS CT – Second Validation Workshop in the Heart of Berlin
After a successful First Validation
Workshop in Brussels earlier
this year, the second Validation
Workshop of the ASSESS CT-project
was held in Berlin in early October.
The workshop proved to be a
success, drawing 58 participants
including 35 eHealth vendors and
specialists as well as invited experts.
The EU-Commission Research
Program Officer Gerald Cultot and
Gerold Werner from Germany’s
Federal Ministry of Health IT
attended the event to present the
different work package contents of
the ASSESS CT project, including
the methodological approach as
well as the project’s current
state of progress.
ASSESS CT – whose working title
is “Assessing SNOMED CT for
large scale eHealth deployments in
the EU” – is subdivided into four
technical work packages.
Work Package 1
Work package (WP) 1 is led by
HL7 International’s Secretary
General Catherine Chronaki and
the experienced HL7 consultant of
HL7 International Giorgio Cangioli.
Its goal is to collect information
about the past, present and future
use of terminologies.
This includes a special focus on
SNOMED CT in the European
Union (EU) but also in many
countries outside the EU, which
are IHTSDO members and
therefore have experience with the
use of SNOMED CT.
For this purpose, the consortium
uses national focus groups, online
questionnaires and conducts
a systematic literature review.
Furthermore, this WP identifies
appropriate use cases suitable
for performing an evidencebased
assessment.
Work Package 2
The topic of WP 2 (subcategory
3) is to experimentally assess
SNOMED CT, alternative
terminologies (UMLS in this
case) and local terminologies
for semantic annotation of
60 clinical narratives from
different medical disciplines in
six European languages. In this
context, the chosen endpoints are
term coverage, concept coverage
and inter-rated agreement. The
results of the term and concept
coverage experiments show that
UMLS probably has higher term
coverage for English. There is
a clear advantage of SNOMED
CT in the Swedish text snippets.
Additionally, the inter-rater
agreement is highly dependent on
the individual interpretation of the
annotation task.
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