Evaluation of the Content Coverage of SNOMED CT: Ability of SNOMED Clinical Terms to Represent Clinical Problem Lists

SNOMED CT, when used as a compositional terminology, can exactly represent most (92.3%) of the terms used commonly in medical problem lists. Improvements to synonymy and adding missing modifiers would lead to greater coverage of common problem statements. Health care organizations should be encouraged and provided incentives to begin adopting SNOMED CT to drive their decision-support applications.