LOINC 2.27, released: July 07, 2009

RELMA 3.25, released:  July 07, 2009

LOINC and RELMA User's Guides: June 2009

New Features

New LOINC Content

LOINC version 2.27 contains 55,058 terms, an increase of 1,714 since the January 2009 version. Approximately 685 terms have been edited.  A total of 1,454 terms have been deprecated.

In this release we have expanded the LONG_COMMON_NAME field to include all LOINC terms.  This process that populates this field as well as the SHORT_NAME field will continue to be modified over the next several releases.  We welcome suggestions on how to improve to make more easily readable terms.

New content in this release includes additional Continuity Assessment Record and Evaluation (CARE) terms, Minimum Data Set (MDS) version 3, Patient Health Record panels, Quality Health Reporting Document Architecture (QRDA), howRU survey, Public Health document, and additional HL7 Clinical Genomics terms.

We have also expanded the number of panels and forms available in our new export format. In addition to the total subset, you can now download several smaller packages of panels and forms containing focused content. These separate packages include: Consumer Health panels and forms, HEDIS 2009 panels, the HL7 Clinical Genetics panels, Newborn Screening panels, US Government panels and forms (including the CMS survey instruments MDSv2, MDSv3, OASIS, and CARE), and Other Survey Instruments. These are available from the main downloads page: http://loinc.org/downloads

New RELMA Features

1. The current version of RELMA has not changed since our January release, because we have been working feverishly on a major update to the program that completely re-writes the program in Microsoft .NET. For this release, we are distributing the previous version of RELMA with the new LOINC content (version 2.27) inside. We hope to have an initial release of the new .NET RELMA later this summer.
   
2. We are very pleased to announce that this release of RELMA has a greatly expanded set of translations. RELMA is now available in separate downloads that contain an additional word indexes in Chinese (China), Spanish (Spain), Spanish (Argentina, and Korean (Korea, Repulic of). These distributions of RELMA allows searching in these other languages in addition to English. In addition to these searchable language translations, RELMA also contains new translations for display in searches for French (France) and a draft Portuguese (Brazil). This brings the total number of additional Linguistic Variants available in RELMA up to 12. More information about the translations efforts is available at http://loinc.org/international