Consumer Name

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.

The LOINC table file contains a CONSUMER_NAME field but it is intentionally left empty. It will be populated once promoted to a production status.

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.

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.