Common tasks when integrating with the NCTS

The NCTS Guide for Implementers provides guidance for many of the common tasks you need to complete when integrating with the NCTS.

Generate a system credential

Log into your NCTS account on the Healthterminologies website and set up client credentials to authenticate to NCTS APIs. Once you log in you can access the ‘Clients’ section at the top right of this page.

Set up your own Ontoserver

Get up and running with a copy of Ontoserver that can syndicate national terminology content from the NCTS.

Common tasks include:

• Generating a system credential
• Requesting an access token
• Accessing the FHIR API on the NTS
• Accessing the syndication API on the NSS
• Downloading the Ontoserver distribution
• Running Ontoserver locally
• Loading national content into a local Ontoserver instance
• Interacting with the Ontoserver FHIR API

NCTS Guide for Implementers 

Ontoserver technical documentation 

Receive updates from the National Syndication Server

To help developers get started, we have provided:

• An open source Java and .NET syndication client implementation which works against the National Syndication Server (NSS). This client provides a:
  • Command line client.
  • Maven plugin.
  • Java library.

The NCTS Guide for implementers provides guidance on how to set up Ontoserver to automatically receive new terminology releases, and how to update Ontoserver itself.

Common tasks include:

• Setting up a scheduled job to retrieve new releases
• Updating the Ontoserver Docker container

Java syndication client

.NET syndication client

Access the National Terminology Service

To help developers get started, we have provided example REST requests in a Postman collection. These are intended to demonstrate how to integrate with the NCTS, including:

• CodeSystem Search to list all SNOMED CT-AU versions available on the server
• CodeSystem Lookup to view all properties of a SNOMED CT code
• ValueSet Expand to view all members of the subset
• ValueSet Expand with a text filter

To use these examples, download the collection and environment variables. Import these files into the Postman application and select the NCTS-R4 environment (recommended, latest FHIR version), or NCTS-STU3 environment (previous FHIR version). Then set the following variables within the appropriate Postman environment:

• auth.client_id: NCTS client credential Client ID
• auth.client_secret: NCTS client credential Client Secret

NCTS Postman Collection

NCTS Postman Environment (R4)

NCTS Postman Environment (STU3)