Question

why is LOINC important for healthcare industry and for interoperability. Discuss how LOINC could be useful to patients.

Answer 1

LOINC, the Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes, is a standard for identifying medical laboratory observations

It has long been recognized that access to standardized, structured data is fundamental to any future, grand healthcare informatics strategy. Large scale data analytics are key to reducing the cost of healthcare (now nearly 18% of the US’s GDP).³ We are already seeing the benefits of artificial intelligence and machine learning used in clinical data analytics in many areas of the healthcare ecosystem—from new discoveries through cohort analysis of non-obvious clusters of interrelated conditions, treatments and outcomes; to care path optimization by analyzing both clinical and financial data; to a bigger focus on early detection, prevention and personalized care through the analysis of genomic, socio-demographic and lifestyle data.

The clinical analytics space is already getting crowded with more than four hundred companies—from early startups to large, corporate entities (IBM Watson Analytics) vying for attention. None has any value unless you get access to large sets of both structured and unstructured medical and financial data, across group, state, national and even international data repositories. Aside from volume, these population data sets will need to use common clinical vocabularies. Currently, that means ICD-10 for diagnosis codes, CPT and ICD-10 for procedure codes, RxNorm codes for drugs, and LOINC for clinical laboratory orders and results.

The U.S. government is finally subscribing to a grand vision for Healthcare IT that calls for clear, unambiguous, interoperability standards. The 21st Century Cures Act was voted into law on December 14, 2016 and aims to facilitate data exchange, favoring exchange standards developed in the private sector. Some may say that adding a myriad of standards amounts to nothing more than government overreach. However, for the laboratory, mandating these new standards is also a major step towards guaranteeing true interoperability, substantially reducing instrument deployment cost and giving laboratory customers more flexibility in working with multiple vendors.