The SNOMED CT International release includes much but not all of the content required for veterinary health records, and for animal-related public health and biomedical applications. The Veterinary Extension of SNOMED CT (VetSCT) is being developed and maintained in order to extend SNOMED CT with additional animal-specific content aligned and integrated with the international release.

The Center for Veterinary Terminology and Standards (VTS) at the Virginia Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia develops and maintains VetSCT. Our activities are guided by two formative principles:

1. Domain-specific terminology content should be created and edited through an organization with expertise in the specific subject of the terminology. In this case, veterinary expertise is requisite.
2. VetSCT must be available to licensed SNOMED CT users without additional licensing restrictions.

VTS places VetSCT into the public domain for uses in commercial or non-commercial applications consistent with the SNOMED CT license. VetSCT will be maintained in a current state aligned with SNOMED CT release cycles for as long as our resources allow. In order to ensure continued availability to the veterinary and public health communities, VetSCT has been added to sources of the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS)

The Veterinary Extension to SNOMED CT is distributed as tab delimited files that conform to the IHTSDO RF2 specifications. To obtain our most recent version of the extension you must obtain a license through the UMLS. UMLS license holders can use UMLS identification to log into our system directly.