In this Update
Once again we’ve packed a ton of great stuff into this release. Our content development has done an incredible job extending and enhancing to the LOINC database, while the software development team has added some great new features to RELMA. Here’s the outline:
Read on for the full details.
Highlights from our best LOINC release yet
New content
LOINC version 2.56 contains 80,868 terms, an increase of 1,909 since the December 2015 version.
Over 20,700 terms have been edited (see “Other edits contained in this release” section below). A total of 2464 terms have been deprecated.
This release includes 875 laboratory, 852 clinical, 176 new survey terms and 6 new attachment terms.
Some of the new content highlights in this version:
- 172 microbiology terms including 16 new Zika virus terms for various specimens and laboratory methods
- 159 molecular pathology terms
- 95 drug/toxicology terms
- 71 chemistry terms
- 166 allergy terms
- 40 pathology terms
- New panels for laboratory terms, including:
- Nearly 200 new Radiology terms, including MR, US, NM and PT terms to complete RadLex mappings for those modalities
- Over 150 new nutrition and dietetics terms that were added to the existing Nutrition assessment panel (75282-4)
- Over 130 document-related codes
- Document template attachment request modifier codes for C-CDA R1.1, R2.0 and R2.1, and CDP Set 1 R1.0 and R1.1
- 84 codes for cardiac echo and angiography measurements, as well as catheterization and angioplasty procedures
- Metabolic equivalent of task & Resting metabolic rate panel (82259-3), which includes about 30 individual terms for reporting physical activity and metabolic equivalents of task
- Personal advance care plan panel (81334-5) and about 40 new terms to represent concepts within that panel
- Preoperative measures for patient safety panel (81679-3)
- Terms to represent concepts in the American Urological Association Symptom Index (AUASI) and International Prostate Symptom Score (IPSS)
- Terms to represent concepts in the Neck Disability Index (82226-2)
- Terms for the CDC’s Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) questionnaire (82152-0)
- Over 75 terms for PROMIS short forms and item banks
- 20 new terms added to the Nursing physiologic assessment panel (80346-0)
- Version 1.4 of the Top2000+ Common Lab Results
- Version 2.0 of the Universal Laboratory Order Codes from LOINC value set
Other edits contained in this release:
- About 12,000 terms with Property of ACnc, Pr or Threshold and Scale of Ord updated to have new Property PrThr
- This change was approved by the LOINC Lab Committee in June 2016.
- The Long Common Names for these terms continue to include the word “Presence” as they always did.
- For more information, please see the LOINC Users’ Guide
- About 1,700 terms with the Method of EIA or EIA.rapid (where EIA was always meant to represent immunoassay) updated to have Method of IA or IA.rapid
- This change was approved by the LOINC Lab Committee in June 2016.
- The Long Common Name for these terms continues to include the word “Immunoassay”, as they always did.
- For more information, please see the LOINC Users’ Guide
- 650 genetics terms updated to include the word “targeted” in the Component
- This change was approved by the LOINC Lab Committee in June 2016
- These terms were always meant to represent targeted mutation analysis.
- 66 genetics terms updated to include 3-letter amino acid abbreviations in the Component rather than 1-letter abbreviations, a change consistent with the recommendations of the HGVS nomenclature committee
- Removed Property of SCnc or MCnc from several panels to further encourage international use, as specified in the LOINC User Guide “Recommendations for Best Practices in Using and Mapping to LOINC” chapter
- Ongoing work with RSNA to establish a unified model for naming radiology terms with changes related to the MR, US, NM and PT domains that affected more than 1500 terms
- Updated more than 100 terms related to patient or family history to have the Property of Hx
Notice of of changes to the public LOINC data files in this release
This release includes previously announced changes to the structure of the LOINC Table:
Field Name: SOURCE
Formal Definition: This is for our internal use and should be ignored by database users.
Action: Deleted
LOINC Linguistic Updates
The global community of LOINC users continues to help produce a wonderful collection of translations. For many years we have made these linguistic variants (we support multiple translations of the same language) available in RELMA and in our online search.loinc.org application. You can also download the translations in the LOINC Linguistic Variants File.
Updated Linguistic Variants in this release:
- Chinese (China)
- French (Canada)
- French (France)
- Italian (Italy)
- Spanish (Spain)
- Turkish (Turkey)
Mapping Feature Highlights
- Enhanced the “Check the Test Names in Local Term File” and “Define Word Substitutions for Local Term Vocabulary” functions to support multi-word substitutions
- Re-factored the “Define Word Substitutions for Local Term Vocabulary” to make it re-sizable
- Filtering on user tags in the “View all Working Set” grid now supports a logical ‘NOT’ operator. This is a game-changer for the usefulness of tags!
- Local terms can be mapped directly on the “View all Working Set Terms” grid
- New “Comment” button on the mapping screen lets you add annotations, “notes to self”, or other commentary about your mappings as needed.
- New search restriction has been added to the “Hierarchy & Search Limits” screen: Exclude non-routine challenge tests
- For most users, this option will really help eliminate some unwanted clutter in your search results.
- Enabling this restriction will eliminate all tests in the CHAL class that are not in the CHAL.ROUTINE LOINC class from the search results
Content Feature Highlights
- We have added two new columns in the data grid of the Answer List Search: “score” and “description”
- The HIPAA attachments display has been modified to allow the user to view the version of C-CDA or CDP1 documents applicable to their use case
- We have greatly enhanced the LOINC PART descriptions displayed in the “detail” pages
- We have curated our catalog of descriptions to show the most relevant ones
- We also enhanced the display to include the PART name and a hyper-link to the “detail” page for the PART itself.
- We added a couple of new search fields available from the command line (see search help for more information)
- CoreComponent
- Supersystem
- Timemodifier
See the RELMA Release notes for more details.