A fast FHIR Terminology Server for SNOMED CT with a small memory footprint.

• Use Case
• Features
• Limitations
• Technical Details
• Quick Start
• Roadmap

• Scaling architecture
• Supporting user data input with SNOMED CT driven search where responsiveness is critical
• Using SNOMED CT offline:
  • Locations with poor connectivity and limited machine memory
  • Trusted research environments that are not able to make external API requests
• Not suitable as a national terminology server

• Host a single SNOMED CT Edition with incredible speed
• SNOMED query support using a subset of ECL
• Perfect for search
  • Most relevant results first
  • Supports terminology binding
• FHIR Terminology Operations
  • CodeSystem lookup
    • Including parents, children, designations, normal form
  • ValueSet expand using SNOMED CT Implicit Value Sets
    • SNOMED CT isa and ecl filters are supported
  • ConceptMap translate using SNOMED CT Implicit Maps

• Only supports the FHIR API
• Read only
• Only supports one snapshot of the SNOMED CT International Edition at this time
  • Support for other SNOMED CT editions and include multiple language search is planned

• Only supports one SNOMED CT CodeSystem at a time
• Minimal memory footprint is perfect for autoscaling
  • After creating the index the app can run with just 500mb memory
• Self-contained application using Apache Lucene™
• Uses Spring Boot and HAPI FHIR Frameworks
• Requires JDK 17

Choose an admin password and replace yourAdminPassword values in the following commands.

Deploy Snowstorm Lite to your local Docker:

docker pull snomedinternational/snowstorm-lite
docker run -p 8085:8080 snomedinternational/snowstorm-lite --admin.password=yourAdminPassword

Upload a SNOMED CT package (takes about 2 minutes):

curl -u admin:yourAdminPassword \
  --form file=@SnomedCT_InternationalRF2_PRODUCTION_20230131T120000Z.zip \
  --form version-uri="https://snomed.info/sct/900000000000207008/version/20230131" \ 
  https://localhost:8085/fhir-admin/load-package

Snowstorm Lite is ready for use. The FHIR interface is here: https://localhost:8085/fhir.

It is also possible to deploy as a Java application, without Docker.

• ECL History Supplement feature (Q4 2023)
• Support for non-english SNOMED CT extensions (Q1 2024)

Full ECL support is not planned. Snowstorm Lite supports the most often used ECL features without the full complexity and memory demands of the complete ECL specification.