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Aligning an Administrative Procedure Coding System with SNOMED CT

OPS, the German coding system for therapeutic and diagnostic procedures, is a large and complex classification system. Its main purpose is to provide codes for billing. Like other systems of this type (e.g. ICD-10) it follows the principle of class disjointness and exhaustiveness. SNOMED CT, on the other hand, aims at providing standardised terms, together with logic-based descriptions, and pursues the goal to make the electronic health record (EHR) computable and interoperable across languages and jurisdictions. We investigated the feasibility of aligning OPS with SNOMED CT, based on the 1000 most frequently used OPS codes. A team of three terminologists performed the mapping (partially overlapping), using the first hundred codes to determine guidelines. From the work, which is currently being extended, we can draw the following conclusions: (i) for less than half of the OPS codes, a semantically equivalent SNOMED CT code can be found; (ii) many maps require SNOMED CT post-coordination but remain approximate; (iii) the mapping work is impaired by imprecise descriptions in either terminology system.