2024 MCBK NA Meeting

The LOINC Ontology: A LOINC and SNOMED CT Interoperability Solution

February 28, 2024

Stanley M. Huff, MD

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September 2022 Business Meetings

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Moving Forward Together- Background

• Shared goal: Improve health and better care through standardized terminology

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• Support enhanced clinical system functionality and interoperability by establishing principled relationships between SNOMED CT and LOINC
• Provide effective support for providers and users who implement different combinations of SNOMED CT and LOINC in health information systems

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• Benefits
• Provides LOINC pathology and lab content in an understood format to countries who do not currently use LOINC
• Provides the foundation to meet the needs of the community for a computable representation of LOINC
• Leverage LOINC and SCT subject matter expertise
• More cost-effective way for both standards to work together
• Sets a precedent for other domains and standard collaborations

LOINC Extension of SNOMED CT

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September 2022 Business Meetings

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More information

• All LOINC content will eventually be in the extension

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• We will map existing SNOMED observables to LOINC codes and make new LOINC codes as needed

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• We are mapping LOINC parts to SNOMED concepts, and creating new SNOMED concepts as needed

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• We will incrementally add domains of information (lab, clinical, documents, radiology, survey instruments)

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• We will include Group concepts in the extension

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• To support exchange of data between systems that use LOINC and systems that use SNOMED CT we have provided a simple translation/equivalence table

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• FSNs in the LOINC Extension will be created by the rules for FSNs in the International addition

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September 2022 Business Meetings

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Progress to date and demonstration

• Preview released mid October 2023
• ≈23K-24K Laboratory LOINC
• Created a user site: loincsnomed.org
• Extension browser: browser.loincsnomed.org

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• Demonstration

https://browser.loincsnomed.org/?

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September 2022 Business Meetings

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Appendix

Further discussion and design

• A new ontological model for document names (these are not observables!)
• Connect value sets (LOINC answer lists) to observable concepts
• Represent
• Collections/panels/batteries
• Survey instruments that include conceptual answers along with a score (Apgars, PHQ9, etc.)
• Language translations

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September 2022 Business Meetings

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Logistics

• Create a governance structure for the project
• Consolidate community working groups & LOINC committees where appropriate
• Design a plan for how we automate the export and import of LOINC concepts into the SNOMED extension, including corrections
• Create an expert advisory community
• Finding additional resources and funding to support the work

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September 2022 Business Meetings

snomed.org | linkedin.com/company/ihtsdo | twitter.com/snomedct | youtube.com/c/ihtsdoorg

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