Problems

The American National Standard/American Dental Association Standard - SNODENT (Systemized Nomenclature of Dentistry) should be added as an element to the USCDI. SNODENT is a clinical terminology designed for use with electronic dental and health records that enables the capture, aggregation and analysis of detailed oral health data. The scope of SNODENT is to provide semantic interoperability for exchange of concepts that is also interoperable with SNOMED CT. SNODENT includes oral anatomical sites, oral health conditions, findings, and other clinical concepts unique to dentistry. SNODENT enables patient data to be recorded by different people in different locations, and to be combined into simple information views in the patient record. It provides a standardized way to represent clinical oral health descriptions captured by dentists and enables automated interpretation of their observations. There remains significant demand from government, educators, researchers, and third parties to relate treatments provided to patients to a diagnosis. Until recently there has not been a diagnostic or descriptive code set created for dentists that enables the provision for a platform-independent, language-independent, cross-cultural, oral health care record. SNODENT is this code set created by the ADA to satisfy this need and it became an ANSI standard in 2017. Unlike other areas of medicine, dentistry has infrequently used diagnostic codes of any sort. Most dental practice management systems were not designed to include diagnostic or other terms, beyond those used for payment purposes. SNODENT is a terminology designed for use in the electronic health records (EHR) environment and its features include: • An oral health resource with a granular clinical content • Provides consistent oral health content for use in electronic dental records • Is mapped to other standard terminologies • Is included in the ONC ISA • Is recognized by and included in HL7/FHIR standards developed for dental data exchange The ADA is a leader in the development, publication, and implementation of interoperability standards in the oral health care setting, and is an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Accredited Standards Development Organization for dental information technology through its Standards Committee on Dental Informatics (SCDI). The SCDI membership consists of a broad range of stakeholder interests, including technology vendors, dental plans, clearinghouses, national dental specialty organizations, practicing dentists, and academics.