Regenstrief Institute, developer of the LOINC standard, and SNOMED International this week announced their new effort toward enabling wider healthcare data exchange: the LOINC Ontology.
WHY IT MATTERS
LOINC is used in nearly 200 countries worldwide and is available in 20 languages. The standard is designed for identifying health measurements, observations and enabling the exchange and collection of data across health systems. Short for Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes, it was created at Regenstrief and is free for users.
SNOMED International is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to set global standards for health terminology. Its SNOMED CT is a comprehensive, multilingual healthcare terminology developed to help healthcare organizations manage patient data in electronic health records, and to facilitate sharing, decision support and analytics in support of safe and effective health information exchange.
The two groups say the LOINC Ontology will support providers who implement different combinations of SNOMED CT and LOINC in health information systems. It’s meant to allow them to meet clinical and regulatory requirements in a single solution.
By linking the two standards together in a complementary way, the groups say it combines SNOMED CT, which provides the computable framework, and LOINC, which provides laboratory and pathology content in an understood format to countries who don’t use LOINC.
This standardized terminology initiative to facilitate health information exchange provides new opportunities for growth of LOINC and SNOMED adopti