A paper by Associate Professor Scott Campbell and colleagues titled ‘Advancements in Interoperability: Achieving Anatomic Pathology Reports That Adhere to International Standards and Are Both Human-Readable and Readily Computable’ has been published as open access in JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics.

In 2020, SNOMED International created the Cancer Synoptic Reporting Working Group (CSRWG). This resulted in international collaboration across multiple pathology organisations. CCRWG’s mission was to use SNOMED Clinical Terms (CT) concepts to represent the required content within the College of American Pathologists (CAP) and International Collaboration on Cancer Reporting (ICCR) published pathology reporting protocols.

In late 2023, the CSRWG published over 1,300 new or revised SNOMED CT concepts to represent all required pathology cancer data elements for adult and paediatric solid tumors in both CAP and ICCR using the semantic principles of the
SNOMED-CT concept model. Thus, computability and interoperability would be broadly established.

This paper describes this important project which brings to fruition the longstanding desire for an international, interoperable, human- and machine-readable cancer pathology report for use in patient care, health care quality improvement, population health, public health surveillance, and translational and clinical trial research.

A link to the paper may be found here.