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Terminology and Classifications Delivery Service Newsletter: May 2022
Terminology and Classifications Delivery Service Newsletter
Welcome to the May Newsletter. In this issue we feature:
- OPCS-4.10 Consultation
- Updated ICD-10 and OPCS-4 National Clinical Coding Standards
- OPCS-4 Capacity
- ICD-11 Pre-Implementation Project
- Clinical Terminology Service
- Changes to SNOMED CT Release Capabilities
- Release of tool to support analysis of medicine data sets
- Global Trade Item Numbers (GTINs) and ingredient strength now available in the NHS Digital Terminology Server
Development work to create OPCS-4.10 is underway. The consultation on the Summary of Changes between OPCS-4.9 and OPCS-4.10 is scheduled to run throughout July as an online survey.
This consultation, inviting feedback on the changes, will be published on Delen and we will confirm the dates of this consultation period in a separate message.
Please visit the OPCS-4 page for the high-level release roadmap and indicative dates of key development milestones.
Updated ICD-10 and OPCS-4 National Clinical Coding Standards
The ICD-10 and OPCS-4.9 National Clinical Coding Standards reference books have been updated to incorporate some minor corrections of the original release; see the summary of changes section for details on the changes. The reference books can be accessed in the Resource Library.
The updated reference books will be available in the Classifications Browser and new eVersion packs will be available to download from TRUD shortly.
NHS Digital is developing the next update to OPCS-4 (OPCS-4.10) for NHS implementation on 1 April 2023 as part of the three yearly release cycle.
The classification has significant capacity constraints, so a revision is required to address this issue and ensure the classification can continue to accommodate developments in clinical practice. NHS Digital has begun early planning and intends to conduct a more extensive user engagement exercise to ensure that this evolution addresses the medium-term needs of the health and care system in the UK.
The long-term future direction will be reconsidered as interoperability across the NHS increases and will reflect further engagement with international standards providers around the identification of a potential international replacement. It is expected that, in the longer term, there will be a need to move to a new procedure classification that can better take advantage of a context when clinical records are comprehensively and consistently populated with SNOMED CT coded data. Consideration of the strategic replacement will include consultation with the NHS.
The scope for the revision work is restricted to the medium-term revision to OPCS-4. We will publish further details on the expected plan and user engagement as this evolves.
In the meantime, our immediate priority is to deliver the OPCS-4.10 update.
ICD-11 Pre-Implementation Project
We have recently initiated a project that will help us prepare for the implementation of ICD-11. The ICD-11 Pre-Implementation Project, will run until March 2023 and will focus on engagement with stakeholders and the development of an ICD-11 Implementation Plan.
Over the coming weeks, information about the project and planned engagement activities will be published on our ICD-11 pages and updates will be provided throughout the year.
Last year we expressed an intention to build greater resilience, by stabilising our release processes (after significant process changes during the pandemic) and enhancing and growing our team. As a consequence of various recruitment exercises, we are close to achieving our pre-pandemic capacities and we will continue to work to develop our skills and capabilities over the coming months.
In the near future, the Clinical Authoring team will contact all requestors of outstanding SNOMED CT submissions on the Request Submission Portal (RSP) to discuss continued needs and priorities.
The Clinical Authoring team has increased its capability to review and prioritise requests to update, maintain and start to develop new reference sets. The "SNOMED CT UK Edition: Governance and Change Request Process” guidance, which can be found at the SNOMED CT section of the RSP, is being updated to reflect this change.
Changes to SNOMED CT Release Capabilities
All SNOMED CT releases to date during 2022 have been produced by the NHS Digital new release build engine.
This work is part of our commitment to continual service improvements. As well as reducing overall build time to just over two hours, the new platform is now routinely producing the SNOMED CT UK Clinical “Monolith” Edition. This is an integrated, fully merged snapshot release of the SNOMED CT UK Clinical Extension, UK Drug Extension, UK Pathology Extension and the International Edition, in one ‘more-ready-to-deploy’ bundle.
The new build platform will also make it technically possible in the future to provide more frequent UK SNOMED Clinical Extension releases. For example, we could consider mirroring the long-established schedule for new releases of the UK Drug Extension.
A four-weekly release schedule would allow us to track the monthly releases of the base SNOMED International content very closely. This would mean UK SNOMED users would benefit from having new content released to them as a continual drip feed from all sources.
Consultation on the future SNOMED CT UK Clinical Edition release schedule will be published in October 2022.
Release of tool to support analysis of medicine data sets
NHS Digital has released a Medicines Text Mining Tool (MTMT) to make it easier to compare medicine data collections from different hospitals in England. The tool maps a hospital medicine description to the closest match in the NHS Dictionary of Medicines and Devices (dm+d) so that medicine data are comparable and in a standardised format. The mapped outputs can only be used for the secondary uses of data and must not be used for direct care (e.g. must not be used to map a hospital drug dictionary for direct care use).
Global Trade Numbers (GTINs) and ingredient strength now available in the NHS Digital Terminology Server
Data from dm+d is available in the NHS Digital Terminology Server and now includes GTINs, (the numbers represented as barcodes) and information about ingredient strength for multi-ingredient products.
The Terminology Server’s web API enables users to query the most up-to-date data from the dictionary (and seven weeks of historical data). The Terminology Server provides an alternative way to access the dm+d data, while the XML files continue to be available to download from TRUD.
Have your say
If you would like more information about any aspect of our products or services, please let us know. Just write to us at information.standards@nhs.net, quoting “T+CD Newsletter” in the Subject field and providing details of what you would like us to cover.
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