By: Kasey Poon
We’ve been getting a lot of requests from customers who need help mapping their laboratory codes to LOINC. They want to be compliant with the LOINC standard for a variety of reasons, including meeting Meaningful Use requirements, public health reporting, and participation in health information exchanges (HIEs). Often these customers’ EHR vendors have created new fields in their code tables to accommodate the LOINC codes. The customers request flat files from us containing their lab codes paired with the LOINC codes that we suggest. They then load these LOINC codes into the EHR tables.
While we’re happy to meet these immediate needs for our customers, we also remind them that providing LOINC codes to them in this manner only provides a “snapshot in time” of their laboratory codes and the LOINC codes. Beyond the initial mapping that we do for them, there is also the issue of maintenance to consider. Maintenance includes updates coming from the Regenstrief Institute to the LOINC standard itself. These updates occur 2-3 times a year. Maintenance also includes changes coming from the customers. These changes can include new lab codes or updates to existing codes. Unfortunately, using flat files for terminology maintenance is not a very robust system for keeping track of changes and updates.
In addition to providing the initial mapping service for our customers, we like to point out the maintenance issues for them to consider. We also remind them of other standards with which they may want to be compliant, such as SNOMED CT.
Kasey Poon is a Physician Informaticist, Clinical Terminology, with 3M Health Information Systems.
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