In 2014, the Department of Pathology, Microbiology and Immunology informatics team led by Dr. W. Scott Campbell began researching enhancements to SNOMED CT content and scope to be used for knowledge capture in pathology reporting. In 2015, the National Institutes of Health awarded University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) investigators Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) funding which included development of extensions to SNOMED CT terminology for pathology data capture and reuse. [U01HG009455 – Deploying ONC National Standards in Support of Metadata for Big Data Research Warehouse Management of Repurposed Laboratory, Pathology and Patient Findings Data from the Electronic Health Record.] The SNOMED CT content development work is now an international effort led by Dr. Campbell with express international requests to promote this SNOMED CT content to the international release of SNOMED CT for broad use worldwide.
The ongoing nature of this work is the development of SNOMED CT content necessary to represent all data elements specified in the College of American Pathologist (CAP) Cancer Protocols and additional data elements represented by other pathology societies including The Royal Colleges of Pathology (e.g., UK, Canada, Australasia) such that each data element is fully computable and context independent (i.e., fully representative of pathologist original intent). This effort supports pathology data capture as part of the standard pathology case reporting and exposes such data to be reused indefinitely in the Electronic Health Record, registries and clinical data warehouses. In collaboration with the CAP, these SNOMED CT concepts are to be aligned with the CAP data element identifiers to normalize historic data and current data captured using CAP cancer worksheets for use in research, public health registries and clinical medicine.
The Nebraska Lexicon© is a SNOMED CT extension namespace authored, developed and deployed at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and Nebraska Medicine.