New Features
New LOINC Content
LOINC version 2.38 contains 68,350 terms, an increase of 3,346 since the June 2011 version. Approximately 490 terms have been edited and 1,765 terms have been deprecated. Some of the new content highlights in this release include terms for NeuroQOL, OPTIMAL (from the American Physical Therapy Association), NEMSIS, the CARE long term care hospital (LTCH) survey, core terms for behavior for SAMHSA (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration), many new radiology terms, genetic tests, circulating tumor cells, flow cytometry tests, and more.
Changes to Database/Table Structure in This Release
As we announced in June 2011, we made a number of changes to the LOINC database fields.
In addition to those changes, we also had to increase the size of the MAP_TO field to 10 characters to match the corresponding size of the LOINC_NUM field (which at one time was erroneously announced to “increase to 7 characters”…which wasn’t an increase at all!). So, for this release, both MAP_TO and LOINC_NUM are 10 characters even though our current identifiers aren’t that big yet. We just needed some room to grow.
New RELMA Features
- Usually this is much faster, but it can also revert back to building them locally on-the-fly (by choice, if no internet connection is available, or for the custom selections
- All of the locally-built details pages are now cached, so you pay the build price only once
Revised and simplified details pages
- Promoted display of the best Component descriptions
- Display term-level mapping guidance from the Mapper’s Guide to the Top 2000+ Lab Observations document. Plan to find a way to incorporate Class and group level guidance in the future.
- Now contain links to Part detail pages instead of displaying descriptions in-line
Other Changes
- Top 300 Common Orders are now displayed as a rank and can be used as a search restriction
- Lots of minor bug fixes and optimizations