SNOMED International announced that Hungary has become a SNOMED International Member. Hungary joins a community of 49 Members globally. It is the fifth following the announcement of EU funding for Member states wishing to adopt SNOMED CT.
SNOMED CT is a comprehensive, multilingual healthcare terminology created by healthcare professionals to capture the care of individuals in an electronic health record and facilitate sharing, decision support, and analytics, to support safe and effective health information exchange.
Hungary’s healthcare system is publicly funded and offers universal coverage to its citizens. While local county hospitals plan and manage inpatient care at the county level, under the supervision of the National Directorate-General for Hospitals, the country administers its healthcare financing system through the National Institute of Health Insurance Fund Management - Nemzeti Egészségbiztosítási Alapkezelő (NEAK).
Since launching an electronic patient record in 2017, Hungary’s efforts to further digitize the healthcare system were spurred in part – as in many countries – by the COVID-19 pandemic. In April 2023, Dr Péter Takács, Hungary’s State Secretary for Health, made strengthening the country’s health resources, infrastructure, and delivery, harnessing technology and innovation to better serve its population, and nurturing its health and care workforce its main priorities.
Other notable activities supporting Hungary’s digital health advancement include a recent study where Hungarian researchers mapped more than 6,000 in-patient and outpatient procedure codes to SNOMED CT, as part of the European Health Data Evidence Network (EHDEN) project.
The EHDEN project’s goals are to reduce the time needed to provide answers in real-world health research by developing the required infrastructure in a federated network at scale across Europe, collaboration on research methodologies, and education in an open science collaboration.
Hungary is also active in cross-border research and data-sharing initiatives, according to a country profile gathered as part of Towards European Health Data Space (TEHDAS). TEHDAS, whose purpose is to help Member States and the Commission develop concepts and guidelines for the governing, usage, and sharing of health data for secondary purposes, is cited as a concrete tool to establish the European Health Data Space and access to health data for secondary uses such as research, innovation, and policy-making.
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