SNOMED International has welcomed Andorra, a small, mountainous European country situated between France and Spain to its growing global organization. Andorra will join a vibrant community of 47 Members globally.

Andorra will be represented at SNOMED International by Andorran Health Care System (Servei Andorrà d’Atenció Sanitària, SAAS.) SAAS is a para-public management health system with regulated agreements and financing subsidized by social security through co-payment. It administers and manages the country’s publicly administered and funded healthcare resources, including one hospital, 11 primary care centres, a nursing home, and a school health service. With a population of just under 80,000, Andorra’s official language is Catalan.

Andorra has embarked on a digital transformation project with the goal of digitizing services across the entire government and its national health system. This project highlights the need to take a comprehensive, intersectoral and interdisciplinary approach to health care, ensure better patient outcomes, and consolidate the system.

Andorra is in the process of creating interoperable frameworks that support the meaningful sharing of health information. The adoption and use of standard terminologies within the electronic health record (EHR) are fundamental to these movements.

Andorra’s health service began its digital journey in 2004 with a project to create an EHR system. Since 2017, according to law, all healthcare centers and professionals that are part of the public health system must report to the EHR the actions carried out on behalf of patients and, in general, all the other annotations that must be made to the EHR. The country’s National 2020 Health Plan highlights the need to build a national patient-centered digital health system.

Andorra’s adoption of SNOMED CT aligns with and supports its digital transformation goals. SNOMED CT, a comprehensive, multilingual healthcare terminology, captures the care of individuals in an EHR and facilitates sharing, decision support and analytics, to support safe and effective health information exchange. 

“Andorra as a country is pleased to be a SNOMED International Member,” said Helena Mas Santuré, Andorra’s Health Minister. “We are looking to strengthen our health system and now our efforts are focused on digital transformation, because we are completely convinced that this step is essential in the development of an up-to-date efficient health system.”

We are equally excited to welcome Andorra to SNOMED International, said SNOMED International CEO Don Sweete, adding, “We look forward to working with the country to implement SNOMED CT. Andorra’s commitment to making interoperability a key enabler across the entire government gives the country a leg up in terms of understanding the benefits of an international healthcare standard such as SNOMED CT and will serve as a guiding beacon as they implement and adopt the clinical terminology.” 

Visit Andorra’s Member page on the SNOMED International website to view the country’s representatives to the Member Forum and the General Assembly.

Media inquiries

Andorra:

Silvia Bonet Perot

Email: sbonet@saas.ad 

Maria Rendon

Email: maria_rendon@govern.ad 

Rosa Vidal

Email: Rosa_Vidal@govern.ad 

Kelly Kuru

SNOMED International

Email: comms@snomed.org