IHTSDO was founded in 2007 by 9 charter member countries (Australia, Canada, Denmark, Lithuania, Sweden, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States) in order to acquire the rights of SNOMED CT from the College of American Pathologists (CAP) and make the development of a global clinical language for healthcare an international, collaborative effort.
The members were (as of December 2016):[3] Australia, Belgium, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel, Lithuania, Malaysia, Malta, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United States and Uruguay.
Member countries commit themselves to the dissemination of the IHTSDO terminologies within their jurisdiction, including where appropriate the creation of local translations, extensions, and mappings.
[citation needed] The organization is structured into four major areas: customer relations, operations, products & services, and strategy.
[4] In 2015, the General Assembly and the management board agreed that the organization's focus for the subsequent 5 years would be (1) demonstrate successful large scale implementations of SNOMED CT (2) remove barriers to adoption for customers and stakeholders, (3) enable continuous development of our product to meet customer requirements, (4) provide scalable products and services that drive SNOMED CT adoption, and (5) set new trends and shape new technologies that increase the overall use of SNOMED CT.[5] IHTSDO aims to achieve interoperability and harmonization between its terminology products and those standards produced by other international standards development organisations (SDOs).
In support of this IHTSDO has negotiated a number of collaboration agreements with other SDOs, such as the World Health Organization, HL7, International Council of Nurses,[6] IEEE,[7] Regenstrief Institute & NPU,[8] openEHR, and WONCA.