SNOMED International and Agence eSanté Luxembourg are pleased to announce that Luxembourg has joined the organization as its thirty-second Member.

Luxembourg, one of the leading nations in the area of information and communication technology, has set the development of eHealth technologies as a high priority. Agence eSanté, Luxembourg’s national agency for the exchange and sharing of medical data, has set an overall mission to facilitate clinical information exchange both within Luxembourg and across other international actors. To work towards this reality, the agency has taken part in discussions about standardization across Europe, a contributing building block achieved with its membership in SNOMED International.

With their membership, Agence eSanté has committed their support for the use of structured clinical terminology. When applied to the health sector, interoperability ensures that information systems, and through them health professionals and patients, can communicate and trust health-related data and understand and use it in the same way. Use of SNOMED CT lends credence to the capacity of Luxembourg’s health information systems to both share and ensure the meaning of the conveyed information.

SNOMED CT is the world’s most comprehensive health terminology. Founded in 2007 by nine charter nations, SNOMED International is a not-for-profit, member-owned and driven international organization. The addition of Luxembourg has grown the organization’s membership to thirty-three countries and territories across five continents, and will enable Luxembourg to manage and use SNOMED CT and other related products, as well as participate on the organization’s General Assembly. CEO, Don Sweete, is pleased to add Luxembourg to the coalition of SNOMED International Members. “Luxembourg joins a global community of practice with shared focus, common needs, and a commitment to leveraging experiences, opportunities and challenges.” He adds, “the value that results from Members working together on shared priorities can’t be underestimated.”

Hervé Barge, CEO of Agence eSanté, states “By introducing and adopting SNOMED CT as a clinical terminology in the context of Luxembourg’s national eHealth platform, we will take further steps towards semantic interoperability of the healthcare system in Luxembourg”.  Mr. Barge further states that “implementing a common referential set of medical terms is also one of the building blocks facilitating the cross-border exchange of medical data between European Member States, thus enhancing high quality and better coordinated cross-border healthcare.”

Luxembourg becomes the nineteenth country in the European region to join SNOMED International, positioning the region for increased interoperability as well as the promise of leveraging learnings amongst its regional and international counterparts.

To learn more about SNOMED International and SNOMED CT, visit www.snomed.org.

To learn more about Agence eSanté Luxembourg, visit https://www.esante.lu/portal/fr/.