A SNOMED ANALYSIS OF 3 YEARS ACCESSIONED CASES (40,124) OF A SURGICALPATHOLOGY DEPARTMENT - IMPLICATIONS FOR PATHOLOGY-BASED DEMOGRAPHIC-STUDIES

Pathology departments devote considerable energy toward indexing diagn oses. To date, there have been no detailed tabulations of the results of these efforts. We have thoroughly analyzed three years' surgical pa thology reports (40,124) generated for 29,127 different patients from the University of Florida at Gainesville between Jan 1, 1990, and Dece mber 31, 1992. 64,921 SNOMED code entries (averaging 1.6 codes per spe cimen and 1.4 specimens per patient) were accounted for by 1,998 disti nct SNOMED morphologies. A mere 21 entities accounted for 50% of the m orphology code occurrences. 265 entities accounted for 90% of the morp hology code occurrences, indicating that the diagnostic efforts of pat hology departments are contained within a small fraction of the many t housands of morphologic entities available in the SNOMED nomenclature. One of the key problems in using SNOMED data collected from surgical pathology reports is the redundancy of lesions reported for single pat ients (i.e., a patient's disease may be coded on more than one specime n from the patient, leading to false conclusions regarding the inciden ce of disease in the population). In this study, redundant SNOMED data was removed by eliminating repeat morphology/topography pairs wheneve r they occur for a single patient. SNOMED data can be stratified on th e basis of age and sex (data fields included on every surgical patholo gy report). This analysis represents the first published analysis of S NOMED data from a large pathology service, and demonstrates how SNOMED data can be compiled in a form that preserves patient privacy.