A Brief History of Healthcare Standards

A few months ago I made casual conversation with my corporate manager about my masters program. I told her I was really enjoying it and I had just given a presentation on the history of ICD and was writing a paper on SNOMED. She immediately thought that would be an awesome idea for a presentation at her staff meeting. Uh, yeah. Awesome...

So now I'm trying to format my ICD presentation for folks with little to no knowledge of what it is and add in SNOMED information without doing more research. It's a pain. Plus I have about a gazillion other work tasks right now (and you are right, posting to my blog is not one of them).

In case you were wondering, ICD is the International Classification for Diseases. In short, it was developed a really long time ago (way before computers) and is revised by the World Health Organization (WHO) every decade and is used across the world to record the reasons people get sick and the reasons they die. It's used for medical coding and billing.

SNOMED is the Systemized Nomenclature of Medicine and is a more recent development. It is seeking to be the standard for electronic medical systems and is wicked flexible and wicked complicated, though organized.

See, I bet you didn't think you'd learn something today, did you?