Malta

In October 2011 Malta joined SNOMED International, contributing to the global effort to develop, maintain, and enable the use of SNOMED CT in health systems around the world.

The Government of Malta makes SNOMED CT available throughout Malta for use in electronic health records, health research, and other applications. Users of the terminology in Malta will also have access to new resources as they are developed.

The Information Management Unit (IMU) in the Ministry for Health considers SNOMED CT to be the terminology of choice for use in electronic health records. It therefore promotes SNOMED CT as a standard for implementation in government health information systems, with a view to achieving better structuring of personal health data and greater standardisation in health record keeping. An important goal is to achieve health data capture at a finer level of granularity in order to avoid the loss of information content that inevitably occurs when classification occurs before codification. The IMU is also developing terminology services to facilitate the practical uptake of SNOMED CT.

Although the national language, Maltese, is the one predominantly used by the local population, Malta’s second official language, English, is the language used as standard in medical records and health-related documentation. There is no plan to translate SNOMED CT into Maltese.

The IMU continues to use SNOMED CT content in its controlled vocabularies, including the National Patient Summary system. Work also continues on mapping of locally-specific health terms to SNOMED CT concepts. Efforts remain focused mainly on terms used for recording of diagnoses, allergies, procedures and medications.

Since the beginning of 2017, Malta has been taking part in the implementation of the European Union’s cross-border eHealth Digital Service Infrastructure. In this programme, EU member states are making use of a subset of SNOMED CT codes to map from certain concepts in their national eHealth infrastructure to those found in the Master Value-set Catalogue used for cross-border interoperability purposes.

More information about SNOMED CT in Mata can be accessed here: https://health.gov.mt/en/imu/snomed-nrc

Affiliated licenses can be obtained at https://mlds.ihtsdotools.org/#/landing/MT