LOINC 2.24, released: July 10, 2008

RELMA 3.24, released: July 10, 2008

LOINC and RELMA User's Guides: July 2008

New Features 07.10.2008

New LOINC Content

LOINC version 2.24 contains 52,412 terms, an increase of 1,603 since the December 2007 version. Approximately 800 terms have been edited.  A total of 1,379 terms have been deprecated.

New RELMA Features

1. You can now see which panels have any of or all of a group of LOINCs. When you look for panels with any of a group of LOINCs, the display is sorted first by the number of LOINCs found in that panel to aid in picking the most similar panel. The "any of" display includes the number of LOINCs found in that panel and their LOINC numbers.
2. LOINC Details now has a new display type, "Custom Display". This display lets you select which sections of the LOINC Details report that you want to see.
3. You can now pick which columns to send to the Clipboard, Excel, a CSV file, or your email program with the new Custom Export action.
4. When you Export Local Terms to a Delimited File, you can now include the LOINC Component, Property, Time, System, Scale, and Method of mapped terms.
5. Row numbers are now displayed on the restriction trees and the multi-axial tree search results.
6. When appropriate, grids now let you switch between word-wrapped and truncated cell contents. If a cell's contents are truncated, then an ellipsis (...) is displayed at the end of the first part of the data.
7. When appropriate, the context menu now has the "Propose a LOINC" action.
8. When you are adding or editing a local term, you can now use the context menu.
9. When displaying LOINC/Part Details, you can type a LOINC/Part number into the LOINC/Part number box, hit Enter, and RELMA will display that LOINC/Part. Then, that LOINC/Part is added to the end of the list of displayed LOINCs/Parts. 
10. The Change Submission form now lists the name of the local term file, the number of local terms in the file, the number of mapped terms, the number of unmapped terms, and the percentage of mapped terms.
11. When you set RELMA to ask for a comment at each mapping, if no comment is supplied for a mapping, then that mapping is not performed.
12. Units from the original submission are now included as part of the example units on the LOINC Details.
13. On the LOINC Details display, externally defined answers are now explicitly shown as externally defined.
14. Importing HL7 now switches to the local term file of the HL7 import.
15. Switching the preferred language from the User Preferences form now immediately loads that language.
16. RELMA now supports searching the LOINC database multiple languages. However, to make the searching effective, additional indexes are needed in the database (RELMA.MDB) Since the database is already very large, it was decided not to ship the database with these extra indexes that may never be used. Instead, we are currently planning to offer the language indexes as additional downloads from the LOINC web site. We will place an announcement on the web site as soon at they are available.
17. The HIPAA HL7 attachments displays have been modifed. These attachements are now displayed on the "Panels, Forms & Surveys" form. These new displays are very preliminary prototypes of the current HL7 draft documents

Other News

As you may have noticed, we’ve revamped our website and it now has several new features. One of them is that when downloading the RELMA tool you’ll have to create a simple account and login. The LOINC committee unanimously approved this change because it will allow us to better track and communicate with the user community. The process to create a login on the site is pretty straightforward, but if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us.