- Pathology & Diagnostics Information Standards Collaboration Space
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- Unified Test List (UTL)
Unified Test List (UTL)
Product Vision Statement
For producers and consumers of pathology and laboratory medicine diagnostics
Who need federated sharing of pathology requests and results within the health and care system
The Unified Test List (UTL) is a catalogue of SNOMED coded laboratory test descriptions to which numeric or text results can be assigned
That can be viewed, transmitted, received and stored across the healthcare estate as part of a standardised electronic message profile
Unlike the mix of (now frozen) Read coded results, local coding and incompletely adopted coded forms
This product provides a single, expandable interoperability standard for test and result coding, identifying test methodology and tightly defining the permitted result form and appropriate unit(s) of measurement.
Introduction
We have identified the need for a single coded list to replace the primary care reporting standard PBCL (Pathology Bounded Code List) and meet hospital reporting needs across more specialised areas.
The Secretary of State vision document describes guiding principles that we should maintain to make this work and one of those is interoperability and openness. It’s not just about technology – agreeing and adhering to clinical data standards will give us much better and more granular detail with which to fight disease and prevent and treat illness.
Our technology infrastructure should allow systems to talk to each other safely and securely, using open standards for data and interoperability so people have confidence that their data is up to date and in the right place, and health and care professionals have access to the information they need to provide care.
December 2021 Pathology BETA Preview Release
In line with the NHS Digital Pathology and Diagnostics Product Roadmap we are pleased to announce a BETA preview release of revised content has now been published in human-readable form on our collaboration space.
An overview presentation of the release is available to download here and the slides from the release feedback workshop can be downloaded here
This release contains 4,220 SNOMED CT concepts:
- 3,866 reportable observable entities
- 354 requestable procedure codes
Significant changes in this release:
- Replacement of the ‘Specimen’ SNOMED attribute with ‘inheres_in’ and ‘direct_site’ attributes for 3,417 reportable concepts
- Lists of terms in tab-separated (TSV) file format are no longer included in the review pack
Separately to this Beta release we are also publishing a number of draft concepts for review on the NHS Digital Kahootz collaboration site.
- ~50 draft candidate concepts representing the specialist discipline of Cellular Pathology: Cytology
Please note these draft concepts have not been assigned SNOMED Concept IDs and are intended for the purpose of reviewing the term descriptions and modelling only:
The Human readable release can be downloaded here and the Cellular Pathology draft candidate code list can be downloaded here
Please use the links below to download the latest supporting documentation:
UTL feedback
- For feedback on the release as a whole please email pathologyanddiagnostics@nhs.net
- Feedback on individual concepts can also be made following the feedback link in the human-readable December 2021 Beta Preview Release
- Join our UTL discussion forum (please note you will first have to email pathologyanddiagnostics@nhs.net to request access)