LOINC Release Notes

Version 2.77, February 2024

Table of contents:

LOINC table core

There were no structural changes to the core table in this release, and no future changes to announce at this time. See the Readme included in the LOINC Table Core download file for information about its current file structure.

See the LOINC table notes below for information on content updates included in this release.

LOINC table

Numbers

New terms and totals by type

Type New terms Total
Laboratory (type 1) 459 61,898
Clinical (type 2) 290 27,154
Attachments (type 3) 3 1,160
Survey (type 4) 81 12,253
Total 833 102,465

Totals by Status

Status Number of terms
Active 92,848
Deprecated 4,853
Discouraged 1,501
Trial 3,263

Term Status changes

Old Status New Status Number of terms Type
Active Deprecated 2 Type 1
Active Deprecated 9 Type 4
Discourage Deprecated 5 Type 4
Trial Active 1 Type 4

Edits by change type

Change type (field name CHNG_TYP) CHNG_TYP definition Number of terms
NAM Component update 47
MAJ Update to one of 5 other primary axes other than Component 1,117
MIN Update to a secondary field - see Updates file Readme for the full list 375
DEL Status changed to Deprecated 16
UND Status changed from Deprecated to Active 0
PANEL Change in the child elements or conditionality of one or more child elements in the panel or a sub-panel contained in the panel 136
Total 1,691

Content highlights

  • In connection with our work with SNOMED International and in an effort to achieve consistency in expression, classification, and description, LOINC parts “Respiratory.lower” and “Respiratory.upper” were updated to “Respiratory System Specimen.lower” and “Respiratory System Specimen.upper” respectively. Overall, 292 LOINC concepts reflect this new modeling approach.
  • Updated 40 concepts that had the Property value of “SemiQn” (Semi-Quantitative) reverted to their previous state from the last release.
  • Created 85 new radiology concepts Added 146 new microbiology concepts from the German Electronic Reporting and Information System for Infection Prevention to support surveillance of notifiable infectious diseases. HL7 (Health Level Seven) (We processed stakeholder requests to update HL7 C-CDA concepts, and we added new concepts to support the HL7 Standardized Medication Profile. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)

Additional tests created in Laboratory LOINC include:

  • Additions in coagulation testing including platelet aggregation and coagulation testing for Lupus and in serology detection of Gamma aminobutyrate A receptor Ab.IgG in cerebrospinal fluid.
  • More than 90 new concepts in Molecular genetics testing including, but not limited to:
    • Multigene analysis for Autoimmune lymphoproliferative syndrome, Breast cancer recurrence risk multigene analysis, Chromosome 5,9,15 aneuploidy, Abnormal clonal sequences, Chronic and low-grade B cell lymphoid neoplasm, Dyserythropoietic anemia, EBV Lymphoproliferation, Erythrocytosis, Hereditary congenital myasthenic syndrome, Hereditary spastic paraplegia, Viral Susceptibility multigene analysis, Fetal Karyotype, and several gene rearrangement and mutation tests.
  • In Drug/Toxicology, we added over 83 new concepts for screening tests for Mitragynine, in addition to confirmatory tests for sleeping pills like Zopiclone, acute migraine treatment, like Rizatriptan, antidepressant medication like Paroxetine, anti-inflammatory and analgesic medications like Naproxen, and anticonvulsant, Gabapentin.
  • In Susceptibility, we added several new concepts for susceptibility to Amoxicillin+Clavulanate, Cycloserine, Ciprofloxacin, ofloxacin, Prothionamide, and Identification of Bacteria in infected blood.

Clinical content highlights

  • New concepts to assess clinical risk using The Hendrich II Fall Risk Model® which is a predictive model with eight items that identifies persons at risk of falls.
  • New content in the Document Ontology to support product labeling associated with the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act.
  • Concepts to capture measurements derived from Ultrasound Echocardiograms, procedures in Cardiology ultrasound specifically measurements of the ejection fraction, as well as the upper and lower limit of the ejection fraction of the Left heart ventricle.
  • We created concepts for a variety of “Medical management note” in Document Ontology to capture the notes from clinical pharmacists as practitioners. Updates were also made to other notes including consultation and progress notes.Survey content highlights
  • New concepts supporting assessment tools around trust in science and scientists
  • More concepts developed to investigate psychological and social aspects as part of a COVID-19 study
  • Concept corrections and new code requests related to HL7 Advanced Directives Information
  • New concepts were created for Patient Health Questionnaire modified for Teens (PHQ-Modified) or PHQ-Teen

Change to the LOINC Table structure in this release

The COMMON_SI_TEST_RANK field has been deleted with this release but has been delayed until February 2024. See below for details regarding this change.

See Appendix A in the LOINC Users' Guide for the current LOINC table structure.Answer Lists

See the ReadMe included in the Answer File folder for information about its current file structure.

This release contains all of the answer lists associated with any LOINC term published in the current release. There have been no changes other than the addition of new content since the last release.

Answer Lists

See the ReadMe included in the Answer File folder for information about its current file structure.

This release contains all of the answer lists associated with any LOINC term published in the current release. There have been no changes other than the addition of new content since the last release.

Change Snapshot

See the ReadMe included in the Change Snapshot folder for information about its current file structure.

The LoincChangeSnapshot file contains all terms that had a change in Status between LOINC version 2.76 and version 2.77, such as from TRIAL to ACTIVE. It does not contain terms that were newly added in 2.77. In the future, this file will likely contain other types of term changes in addition to Status changes.

The PartChangeSnapshot file contains all of the Parts that had a change in Status between LOINC version 2.76 and version 2.77, such as from ACTIVE to DEPRECATED or ACTIVE to INACTIVE (see ReadMe for Status definitions). In the future, this file may contain other types of Part changes in addition to Status changes.

Consumer Names - Alpha

See the ReadMe included in the Consumer Name folder for information about its current file structure.

This release of the Consumer names file remains at Alpha pre-production status. It contains Consumer names for all Type 1 (Laboratory) and a subset of Type 2 (Clinical) terms in LOINC. The Consumer Names are created algorithmically based on the set of primary rules documented in the associated ReadMe notes.

Consumer Names are intended for downstream display only and are not intended to be used at any point in the clinical workflow, or for the purpose of mapping local terms to LOINC. Their use case includes consumer-facing health and wellness applications that use LOINC to encode the underlying data.

We welcome user feedback about these names.

Document Ontology

See the ReadMe included in the Document Ontology folder for information about its current file structure.

Document Ontology OWL - Alpha

See the ReadMe included in the Document Ontology OWL folder for information about its current file structure.

The Document Ontology OWL file, first released with LOINC version 2.74, includes all the changes and additions to LOINC documents and document ontology values in a format that allows navigation of document axis hierarchies and exchange as a formal ontology. It continues at Alpha status, meaning that it is part of a testing process, and the LOINC team continues to welcome comments regarding its usability and content.

Groups - Beta

See the ReadMe included in the Group File folder for information about its current file structure.

This release of the Group File remains at Beta pre-production status. We received no significant public comments about its contents, structure, or utility that we would have used as the basis for incrementing its maturity level or conceptualization. If you are using this file and have feedback (good or bad), please contact us.

The LOINC Groups project is a work in progress. The contents of this file may change from release to release as we receive feedback from users and refine our processes.

The contents of the file and the groupings MUST be validated by the user prior to implementation in any aspect of clinical care. We have created Groups that may be useful in specific contexts, but these Groups have not been vetted for use in either patient care or research and should be used with caution.

Imaging Document Codes

See the ReadMe included in the Imaging Document folder for information about its current file structure and query used to generate the set of LOINC codes.‌

There have been no changes other than the addition of new content since the last release.

Linguistic Variants

See the ReadMe included in the Linguistic Variants folder for information about its current file structure.

Updated linguistic variants are generally based on the previous release version (i.e., LOINC version 2.74 is translated for inclusion in the 2.75 release). The de_DE German (GERMANY) linguistic variant for 2.77 does contain translations for new terms introduced in version 2.77.

Updated content for the LOINC 2.77 release has been provided by the translation for the following linguistic variants:

Language Name
de_AT German (AUSTRIA)
fr_CA French (CANADA)
zh_CN Chinese (CHINA)
fr_FR French (FRANCE)
de_DE German (GERMANY)
it_IT Italian (ITALY)
nl_NL Dutch (NETHERLANDS)
es_ES Spanish (SPAIN)

The table below shows the LOINC version when each linguistic variant included in this release was last updated.

Linguistic variant Version last updated
Chinese (CHINA) 2.77
Dutch (NETHERLANDS) 2.77
Estonian (ESTONIA) 2.23
French (BELGIUM) 2.47
French (CANADA) 2.77
French (FRANCE) 2.77
German (AUSTRIA) 2.77
German (GERMANY) 2.77
Greek (GREECE) 2.34
Italian (ITALY) 2.77
Korean (KOREA, REPUBLIC OF) 2.27
Polish (POLAND) 2.75
Portuguese (BRAZIL) 2.51
Russian (RUSSIAN FEDERATION) 2.65
Spanish (ARGENTINA) 2.15
Spanish (SPAIN) 2.77
Spanish (MEXICO) 2.72
Turkish (TURKEY) 2.56
Ukrainian (UKRAINE) 2.75

Please note that some term translations are based on the translation of Parts. For such translations, even if no additional Part translations were provided by the producer, the number of translated terms may vary from release to release because new LOINC terms using previously translated Parts will also be included, and old LOINC terms that have been updated to use untranslated Parts will be excluded.

LOINC IEEE Medical Device Code Mapping Table

See the ReadMe included in the LOINC IEEE Medical Device Code Mapping Table folder for information about its current file structure.

There have been no changes to the structure or contents of this file since the LOINC 2.67 release in December 2019.

LOINC RSNA Radiology Playbook

See the ReadMe included in the LOINC RSNA Radiology Playbook folder for information about its current file structure.

There have been no changes other than the addition of new content since the last release.

The mappings to and content from the RSNA Playbook are based on version 2.4 of that terminology and Radiology Part mappings are based on RadLex version 4.1 and pre-release 4.2.

We are still seeking feedback on the usefulness of the PartSequenceOrder field from anybody who is utilizing this file to help inform our future efforts, e.g., whether we should remove this field.

Known issues:

Parsing issue for terms with multiple Aggregation or View type values in which one or more values is not being assigned the correct PartSequenceOrder value. We plan to address the parsing procedure in a future release if necessary, depending on whether users find this field useful (see request for feedback above).

A few outstanding cases for LOINC Radiology Parts without mappings to RadLex RIDs exists. We plan to review these with RSNA and add mappings, as appropriate, in a future release.

Terms with XXX (meaning Unspecified) as the Region Imaged without an Imaging focus do not have an Anatomy attribute (Region imaged or Imaging focus) represented in the file. The LOINC/RSNA Committee is reviewing the representation of XXX without a specified imaging focus in the LOINC/RSNA model to determine how the Anatomy should be represented.

LOINC Universal Lab Orders Value Set

See the ReadMe included in the LOINC Universal Lab Orders Value Set folder for information about its current file structure.

There have been no changes to this file since the last release.

Component Hierarchy By System

The Component Hierarchy By System (formerly known as Multiaxial Hierarchy) file provides a way to organize LOINC codes based on multiple axes of each concept. See the ReadMe included in the Component Hierarchy By System folder for information about its current file structure.

There have been no changes other than the addition of new content since the last release.

Panels and Forms

See the ReadMe included in the Panels and Forms folder for information about its current file structure.

Version 2.75 added a new "AdditionalCopyright" field to the PanelsAndForms.csv file. The new column is within the context of the panel.

Parts

See the ReadMe included in the Part File folder for information about its current file structure.

This file contains all of the parts associated with any LOINC term published in the current release. Note that it does not contain Parts that are used to organize terms in the Component Hierarchy By System.

There have been no changes to this file other than the addition of new content since the last release.

The LoincPartLink_Supplementary file exceeds the row capacity of Excel and LibreOffice.

Updates

See the ReadMe included in the Updates folder for information about its current file structure. As a reminder, the CHANGE_REASON_PUBLIC and STATUS_TEXT fields are no longer be considered when determining if a LOINC term has been updated because they contain information for users about term edits but are not directly related to the attributes of a term.

There have been no changes to this file other than the addition of new content since the last release.

The Updates.mdb file will be removed in a subsequent release. It covers more fields than the Updates.csv file. This additional granularity will be replaced in a corresponding CSV file.

RELMA Changes

The ability to create submissions using RELMA has been discontinued. The submission functionality has been removed in RELMA version 7.10. We encourage organizations and individuals to use our online submission form. See loinc.org/submissions for more information.

Additionally, we have removed the functionality to export full panel structures to Excel from the tool. This is due to an out of memory application error that occurs when you try to perform that process. This functionality is still available on our web-based search application - https://loinc.org/search/ See the LOINC Knowledge Basic for instructions.

We will be retiring our online RELMA search engine. Starting with the new version 7.10, the program will now use its local search engine. For versions prior to 7.10, users will need to make a configuration change to use the local, Lucene-based search engine. More information is available in the LOINC Knowledge Base. The online search engine using Apache Solr will be frozen at LOINC version 2.76 for the remainder of its life.

Reminder: Beginning with version 2.72 in Feb. 2022, we streamlined the LOINC release structure to make it easier for users to access all of the necessary files. The LOINC table and accessory files are included in a single archive, and RELMA is provided as a separate download file. Individual accessory files are no longer available as separate downloads.

Knowledge Base

Users’ Guide

Search Syntax

RELMA

FAQ