RELMA 4.2, released:  December 30, 2009

LOINC and RELMA User's Guides: December 2009

New Features

New LOINC Content

LOINC version 2.29 contains 57,475 terms, an increase of 2,417 since the June 2009 version. Approximately 830 terms have been edited.  A total of 1,546 terms have been deprecated.

New RELMA Features

1. Previous version of RELMA stored its working data files in the c:\program files directories by default. In newer versions of Windows such as Vista and Windows 7, Microsoft has asked developers to move data files out of this directory. In fact, due to new security restrictions imposed on these directories by the operating system it is difficult for an average user to access these directory. Therefore, in order to comply with the Microsoft application requirements new installations of RELMA will place its data files in the users documents directory under the /RELMA sub-folder folder.
   
2. A simple search screen has been added to RELMA. The Welcome screen button for simple search is labeled "Search LOINC", and the File menu choice is "Search LOINC Database". The simple search screen lets you enter a search phrase and retrieve search results on a clean,uncluttered screen. Searches can be restricted on the simple search screen by units or by whether the LOINC is a common test (one of the 99.+% Common Tests (as determined by an analysis of Indiana Network for Patient Care (INPC) data).
3. If a LOINC is one of the 99.+% Common Tests (as determined by an analysis of Indiana Network for Patient Care (INPC) data), the percentage of that test is listed in the simple search screen results, the mapping screen grid search results, and on the mapping screen multi-axial tree search results.
4. The standalone "Add/Edit Local Terms" form has been removed. You can now review your local codes from the "View All Working Set Terms" tab of the main mapping screen.
5. The search screen includes a spell checker. As you finish typing words and hit the space key, any words that are unknown to the LOINC system will be displayed with a red squiggle underline. If you right click on the unknown word, RELMA will display its best guess of a word the RELMA know. When doing a search, RELMA will ignore any words that have the red squiggle underline.
6. The "Custom Export" function used to export your LOINC search results to other programs or systems has been significantly re-worked. The right click menu options; "Copy to Clipboard", "Save to File", "Export to Excel", "Send to Email" and "Custom Export" have all been replaced by the"Export" and "Configure Export". Please see the RELMA user guide for detailed information on using these new options.
7. The options available on the "Custom Display" option of the LOINC detail display screen have extensively reworked. Hopefully, they are easier to use and more intuitive to understand.
8. Additional data validation has been added to the LOINC Submission form, including confirmation messages during editing process.