LOINC version 2.73 is available for download from the LOINC website.
Informed by tracking healthcare trends, evaluating concept requests, and listening to guidance from our community, this release contains new, edited, and newly mapped concepts in Laboratory, Clinical, Survey, and other domains. It features the streamlined file structure adopted in the February 2022 release for more efficient download and use. Some highlights include:
- 811 new concepts
- 283 Laboratory
- 307 Clinical
- 221 Surveys
- New Top 20000 rankings replacing the previous Top 2000+
- 700+ new LOINC Part mappings to FDA UNII, in addition to other external mappings
Four columns have been removed from the Loinc.csv file with this release: UnitsAndRange, SUBMITTED_UNITS, CDISC_COMMON_TESTS, and EXAMPLE_SI_UCUM_UNITS. As is our practice, notice was given of this change in August 2021. The artifact previously known as the Multiaxial Hierarchy has been renamed to Component Hierarchy by System to better reflect its composition and align with other hierarchies available within the new Hierarchy Browser.
You can read more about all the changes in the LOINC Release Notes in the LOINC Knowledge Base.
Release highlights
Release 2.73 reflects our understanding of health care trends, the importance of collaboration and delivers on our commitment to support information exchange and semantic interoperability. This release contains new content related to the COVID-19 pandemic including SARS-CoV-2 concepts to support specialized microorganism testing by CDC, new concepts related to Monkeypox virus testing, and concepts related to allergy measurement of IgG and IgG4 levels for various allergens, molecular genetic tests, and drug/toxicology testing on various specimens.
Through our work with HL7® on the Gender Harmony Project, we updated concepts (in trial status pending HL7 final guidance) to align with the change in the industry with respect to equity and inclusion developments. Newly created concepts impacting health trends for this release include: cancer GAAD Score (Hepatocellular carcinoma risk), prostate cancer multigene analysis in blood and tissue, and Model for end-stage liver disease(MELD Sodium score). The Brief Resilience Scale panel to use in connection with the ORCHESTRA project (Connecting European Cohorts to increase Common Response to SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic). We developed SDOH screening reports and developed coding for screening for elder mistreatment to support health equity trends.
More concepts were created and added to the Survey class. These surveys are modeled either to support specific clinical domains in Orthopedics such as the Knee Society Score and post-op Harris Hip Score. ,New Mental Health to support initiatives like SDOH instruments with the Norwalk Community Health Center Screening tool. Additional content was developed to support R-Outcomes surveys which includes user satisfaction, privacy, digital confidence, personal safety, neighbor relationships, loneliness, product confidence, and digital readiness.
We continue periodic internal maintenance on the LOINC database. In this release, we launched our Top 20000 ranking to replace the Top 2000 ranked , we added more mappings of LOINC parts to external mappings, including new mappings of LOINC Allergens to FDA UNIIs (Unique Ingredient Identifiers) and Ukrainian translation to LOINC.
LOINC software tools are no longer tied to specific LOINC database releases. Since the release of LOINC 2.72 in February we have developed a new Hierarchy Browser tool which allows users to view several trees that exist within LOINC including Component Hierarchy by System, Document Ontology, and Panels. The Hierarchy Browser is the ideal complement to SearchLOINC, a separate web application which was also updated during this period. A free LOINC login is required to access these resources.
This is the second release of LOINC that uses our new streamlined release file structure. This update in structure is designed to simplify the release and to make it easier for users to access all the necessary files. The LOINC table and all accessory files are included in a single archive, and RELMA is provided as a separate download file.