SNOMED-ENCODED SURGICAL PATHOLOGY DATABASES - A TOOL FOR EPIDEMIOLOGIC INVESTIGATION

Pathology departments have invested considerable energy, sometimes ext ending over several decades, toward coding their anatomic pathology re ports, As a result of these labors, there is now a vast amount of elec tronically coded data from surgical pathology reports, holding a wealt h of information relevant to virtually every recognized pathologic ent ity. The original intent of the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED) was to prepare population-based disease data from pathology r eports, but no such studies have emerged in the medical literature, Th is is due in part to the nonuniform, idiosyncratic, and incomplete man ner in which most SNOMED databases are constructed, Automatic (compute r-driven) coding provides uniformity and completeness of SNOMED databa ses and offers the possibility of customized recoding for an entire co llection of reports using any nomenclature and any set of coding algor ithms, In prior investigations, rye described a computer program that SNOMED-codes surgical pathology reports, and we provided an analysis o f a large surgical pathology SNOMED database. In this report, we descr ibe the importance of coded surgical pathology databases for research, teaching, hospital administration, and public health, and we explain the functional differences between coded databases and free-text colle ctions of surgical pathology data Surgical pathology departments and v endors of laboratory information systems can ensure that surgical repo rt files can be automatically coded or recoded with any chosen nomencl ature by adhering to simple guidelines.