Consumer Names are labels designed for use in consumer-facing applications
The Consumer Name was originally hand-crafted for a very small subset of LOINC terms. At its inception, these names were labeled as “experimental”, and the original names were not maintained. In 2019 we undertook a concerted effort to develop a more comprehensive set of consumer-friendly names, primarily based on the increasing availability of consumer-facing health and wellness apps that take advantage of existing LOINC codes for the underlying data.
We have created Consumer Names for all LOINC Laboratory terms and a subset of most common clinical measurements, such as vital signs.
Consumer Names are created based on manually crafted consumer name text for each Part. In contrast to the other names, this text may represent a more general concept for the defining Part. These names do not represent each of the defining Parts of a given term, are not unique, and do not include an indicator that a term is deprecated.
TIP For more information on LOINC Names including high-level rules for building Consumer Names, see Section 9.1.1 "Names" of the LOINC Users' Guide.
ALPHA
LOINC’s Consumer Names have an Alpha status. We do not have a schedule for promoting Consumer Names to a production status.
Examples
The following table illustrates the differences between Consumer Names and clinically-appropriate Long Common Names. Consumer Names, when available, are included on Details Pages for each LOINC term.
| LOINC | Consumer Name | Long Common Name |
|---|---|---|
| 630-4 | Culture, Urine | Bacteria identified in Urine by Culture |
| 69958-7 | Food Mix (Orange, Apple, Banana, Peach) Allergy Test, Blood | Food Allergen Mix 15 (Orange+Apple+Banana+Peach) IgE Ab [Units/volume] in Serum by Multidisk |
| 24476-4 | F2 gene Variant Analysis, Blood or Tissue Specimen | F2 gene mutations found [Identifier] in Blood or Tissue by Molecular genetics method Nominal |
| 87422-2 | Glucose After Meal, Blood | Glucose [Mass/volume] in Blood --post meal |
Download
LOINC Complete
Your LOINC login is required to download. This accessory file is available within the combined LOINC file. Get more information on files included within this zip archive.
| Version | 2.78 |
| Released | 2024-08-06 |
| Size | 71.57 MB |
API Access
Consumer Names are not currently available as part of the CodeSystem resource of LOINC's FHIR Terminology Server. We will work to define a property for these after Consumer Names reach a production status.