Coding Standards
SNOMED CT
Comprehensive multilingual clinical terminology with over 350,000 concepts, designed for EHR documentation and clinical decision support.
Definition
SNOMED CT (Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine - Clinical Terms) is a structured clinical terminology with over 350,000 active concepts arranged in a polyhierarchical IS-A graph. Concepts identify findings, disorders, procedures, body structures, organisms, substances, and many other clinical content types, each with multiple synonymous descriptions in the active language edition.
It is owned and distributed by SNOMED International; in the U.S., the National Library of Medicine licenses the U.S. edition free of charge under the SNOMED CT Affiliate License. SNOMED CT is the recommended terminology for problem lists, clinical findings, and procedures inside electronic health records under U.S. ONC certification criteria.
SNOMED CT and ICD-10-CM are complementary. SNOMED CT is used inside the chart (problem lists, encounters, discharge summaries) for fine-grained clinical detail; ICD-10-CM is the billing classification submitted to payers. UMLS provides authoritative many-to-many mappings between the two.
When to use
- •Inside the EHR for problem lists, encounter reasons, and clinical findings.
- •FHIR Condition.code, Observation.code, and Procedure.code elements where the ImplementationGuide specifies SNOMED CT.
- •Clinical decision support rules and computable phenotype definitions.
Try it in AutoICD API
Get SNOMED CT mappings alongside an ICD-10 coding
curl -X POST https://autoicdapi.com/v1/code \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $AUTOICD_API_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{
"text": "Patient has chronic atrial fibrillation.",
"include_snomed": true
}'Language: bash. View full API docs · Get an API key.