It may seem daunting to implement the two standards within your local database for public health reporting, especially if you’re a team of one, but you can leverage the work of experts from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Public Health Information Network Vocabulary Access Distribution System (PHIN VADS).

The Regenstrief Institute released version 2.66 of the Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC) on June 21st this year.

When a new LOINC version is released, The Eagles song ‘Life in the Fast Lane’ always comes to mind.

The six attributes of a LOINC code are component, property, timing, system, scale and method.

Staying ahead of the curve: latest LOINC release changes

LOINC’s 25th Anniversary was celebrated on February 16, 2019 with a social media blitz of timeline, photo archive and many well wishes from around the world on Twitter and the LOINC Forum.

The challenge in mapping Anatomic Pathology (AP) reports to LOINC comes from interpreting the narrative nature of the AP information system fields that comprise a report and determining component and property attributes in LOINC.

The latest release of LOINC (v2.65 Dec 2018) has a few laboratory updates for which you’ll want to check your existing mapping, and it’ll be great to get them done before the next release, anticipated for June 2019.

The Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes—widely known as LOINC—is a standard terminology created to enable a common understanding of laboratory and clinical observations, such as lab tests and results, vital signs and other clinical measurements and procedures.

Terminologies - critical but often deferred in FHIR application development