SNOMED CT... the way forward?

I'm glad my home country has decided to adopt SNOMED CT as the standard medical terminology to be used in electronic health records (EHR) [source]. Now all that learning won't be for nothing! ;)

Hopefully with worldwide adoption, SNOMED will finally be available without charge. Perhaps some day we would be able to import the extensive vocabulary into Freebase, DBPedia and/or Wikipedia.

If you're looking for a good browser for SNOMED, I would highly recommend SNOB. It's available freely and a server-based version is currently in development. SNOB allows you to browse, create subsets and displays crossmaps with other vocabulary.

I also highly recommend that you license the use of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) in your systems if you qualify. The project was started by the National Library Museum (NLM) in 1986 and provides a centrally-managed methathesaurus plus a whole bunch of other tools including a web services API.