A State-of-the Art Review of SNOMED CT Terminology Binding and Recommendations for Practice and Research

BACKGROUND: Unambiguous sharing of data requires information models and terminology in combination, but there is a lack of knowledge as to how they should be combined, leading to impaired interoperability. OBJECTIVES: To facilitate creation of guidelines for SNOMED CT terminology binding we have performed a literature review to find existing recommendations and expose knowledge gaps. The primary audience is practitioners and researchers working with terminology binding. METHODS: PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science were searched for papers containing "terminology binding," "subset," "map," "information model" or "implement" and the term "SNOMED." RESULTS: The search yielded 616 unique papers published from 2004 to 2020, from which 55 papers were selected and analyzed inductively. Topics described in the papers include problems related to input material, SNOMED CT, information models, and lack of appropriate tools as well as recommendations regarding competence. CONCLUSION: Recommendations are given for practitioners and researchers. Many of the stated problems can be solved by better co-operation between domain experts and informaticians and better knowledge of SNOMED CT. Settings where these competences either work together or where staff with knowledge of both act as brokers are well equipped for terminology binding. Tooling is not thoroughly researched and might be a possible way to facilitate terminology binding.