Are posttraumatic stress disorder mental health terms found in SNOMED‐CT medical terminology

Abstract

The authors sought to evaluate how well the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine-Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT) controlled vocabulary represents terms commonly used clinically when documenting posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A list was constructed based on the PTSD criteria in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV; American Psychiatric Association, 1994), symptom assessment instruments, and publications. Although two teams mapping the terms to SNOMED-CT differed in their approach, the consensus mapping accounted for 91% of the 153 PTSD terms. They found that the words used by clinicians in describing PTSD symptoms are represented in SNOMED-CT. These results can be used to codify mental health text reports for health information technology applications such as automated chart abstraction, algorithms for identifying documentation of symptoms representing PTSD in clinical notes, and clinical decision support.