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The public health program perspective: This presentation looks at how microorganisms are identified and described for lab test reports. For public health reporting, microorganism identification is commonly accompanied by subtype determinations such as serotypes, antigenic formulas, biotypes, virulence traits, and antimicrobial susceptibility profiles. How should standard vocabularies manage these different types of subtypes?
The message sender and receiver perspective: This presentation uses Salmonella and E. coli lab test results to explore microorganism issues and challenges. Local public health labs must be able to work with both local codes and standard code systems. Different laboratory methods can produce different results on the same specimen. Standard vocabularies should be flexible enough to accommodate these things and to incorporate previously un-named microorganisms. It should be easy for microbiologists to use standard vocabularies and to maintain them in their lab information system.
The SDO perspective discusses the successes and challenges of representing microorganisms in SNOMED CT. Which characteristics of microorganisms are represented in SNOMED? What are the issues regarding SNOMED naming conventions and semantic equivalencies? Should we use SNOMED Finding concepts to represent organisms? Why are there different criteria for adding new concepts to the SNOMED CT International release vs. the US Extension to SNOMED CT? What have we learned from ongoing projects to address the challenges of representing organisms in code systems?