SNOMED subsets & OT assessments tools
The College has developed a national list of published clinical assessment tools used by occupational therapists. The list has been incorporated into SNOMED CT as a subset.
SNOMED is the national clinical terminology that will be used in every electronic care record in NHS England from April 2015. SNOMED contains more than 400,000 clinical terms gathered from all healthcare professions and arranged in a structured hierarchy. Each clinical term has a code, so enabling patient information to be effectively searched, aggregated and routinely analysed, at a local and national level.
The SNOMED subset of assessment tools will be directly useful to OTs by providing a single list of all the main assessment tools used by OTs. System developers will be able to use this OT subset to provide a pick list in electronic care records of the main assessments used by OTs. This will help to ensure OTs can quickly, accurately and consistently record patient information in the electronic record. The subset should be available in some electronic care record systems in 2013, depending on the priority given to this functionality by the various system developers.
Download SNOMED Subset: Assessments used by Occupational Therapists
Many OTs do not use electronic care records yet, but this national development is one of many that will help to ensure that electronic care records are developed to be compatible with, and to fully support occupational therapy practice and record keeping.
The second OT subset in development is a list of terms for the Outcomes for Patients, to be recorded by occupational therapists. The third will be the Aims of Occupational Therapy intervention. These subsets are due to be completed in 2012.
The profession is developing 3 additional subsets, namely: Problems, Goals and Interventions. These subsets will help to ensure that OTs can use consistent language to agree and record care plans for service users.
