# Preparing Data for Analytics

As discussed in the Section about Substrates for Analytics, not all electronic health records represent clinical data using SNOMED CT. However, even when health records use free text or other code systems, it is still possible to use SNOMED CT for analytics over this data if the data is prepared appropriately. For example, Natural Language Processing can be used to encode free text data in SNOMED CT, subsequently enabling more sophisticated analytics to be performed. Similarly, clinical data using other code systems can be mapped into SNOMED CT to provide similar benefits.

In this section, we discuss these alternative ways of preparing clinical data for analytics using SNOMED CT.
