SNOMED CT During the Admission: A Realistic Operating Model for Concurrent Care-Process Management, Quality Control, and Quality Assurance in a General Hospital
Abstract The central implementation question is not whether SNOMED CT can improve coding at discharge, but whether it can become part of the care process itself. The answer is yes, but only under specific socio-technical conditions. SNOMED CT is most useful during admission when it is used as the semantic layer for working diagnoses, procedural events, pathway activation, clinical context, task orchestration, and real-time feedback , rather than as a retrospective abstraction exercise. Official SNOMED CT guidance explicitly frames the terminology as a means to “collect once and use many times,” and as an enabler of point-of-care analytics, decision support, and reporting that directly benefit clinicians and patients. In practice, this means that diagnoses and procedures must be recorded in small, workflow-specific SNOMED CT subsets; linked to timestamps, locations, and care states; and continuously reused for clinically relevant alerts, meaningful dashboards, and quality assurance (QA...