With a Committee meeting and new release, June is always a big month in LOINC-land. As we wrap up our second quarter and are enjoying summer, I wanted to share some of the key highlights from the last few months. We’ve got new users, new team members, a new release, and a new LOINC award.

LOINC user growth

• Over the last few months, LOINC use and adoption has continued to grow around the world.
• There are now more than 44,500+ registered users in 172 countries.
• We add 5,000 to 6,000 new registered users on loinc.org each year.
• The main loinc.org website gets about 40,000 page views each month.
• The LOINC Search App has about 5,000 unique visitors each month.
• The LOINC web traffic comes from all over the globe. The top 10 countries of our visitors are United States, India, Canada, Germany, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Australia, France, Austria, Spain.

A brand new comprehensive, but easy-to-follow way to get started with LOINC

The June 2016 LOINC and RELMA Workshop featured a completely re-designed curriculum based off of my new book LOINC Essentials. This book is a step-by-step guide for getting your local codes mapped to LOINC. Quite simply, it’s the fastest and most comprehensive way I know of to learn LOINC. If you want to jump start your LOINC mapping, this is the book for you.

New additions to the LOINC team

Over the last couple of months, our small but mighty team has gotten a little bigger. Let me briefly introduce you to them.

Sara Armson

Sara first joined the LOINC team back in May 2015 as a data and project coordinator, splitting her time between LOINC work and the Global Health Informatics program at Regenstrief. In January of 2016, she accepted the role of content developer on the LOINC team and began devoting all of her effort with us. She brings with her a wide breadth of previous experience in international interface health terminologies, health informatics project management, and behavioral health assessment. On the LOINC team, she’ll be primarily focused on patient assessment instrument content, and we’re very excited to have her on board.

Tim Briscoe

Tim joined the LOINC team in April 2016 as our first ever web developer. Because I’ve been assuming most of that work without being able to give it the proper attention it deserved, as you can imagine, there is no one more excited about having Tim on board than me. Tim comes with many years of experience in the industry and has been making great progress behind the scenes already. I’m really excited about some of the new things you’ll be seeing in the months ahead.

Mary Zabriskie

Mary joined the LOINC team in June 2016 as a content developer, using her experience as a medical technologist to focus on lab LOINC content. This was actually the second time I hired Mary. She previously worked at Regenstrief on the healthcare terminology team that managed the dictionary and mappings for the Indiana Network for Patient Care. As that project wound down, she went to work for Intelligent Medical Objects as a LOINC specialist terminology analyst. When the opportunity to join the LOINC team came, we both thought it’d be a great fit for a new adventure.

Katie Allen

Katie joined the Regenstrief Institute back in 2008, and has held various roles in project and grants management. In July 2016 she became the Program Manager for LOINC and Data Standards at Regenstrief’s Center for Biomedical Informatics, but she’s always been a LOINCer at heart. In fact, because of various transitions she helped compile and submit both of our 5 year contracts for LOINC development from NLM. As LOINC continues to grow, we are delighted to have Katie as our first ever Program Director. In her new roll, she’ll be functioning like COO, helping us improve our internal operations to continue making LOINC the world’s best standard for tests, measures, and observations.

Highlights from the latest LOINC release

The June LOINC release was another spectacular release. The release announcement summarizes the main highlights. With more than 1,909 new terms and edits to more than 20,700 terms, this was a jam-packed release. Yes, you read that right. Edits to more than 20,700 terms. With approval from the Lab LOINC Committee, we executed on a couple of large scale updates that have been under discussion for several years.

The LOINC content development team has also done a remarkable job tackling our backlog of term requests. We got caught up to processing all requests received 3 months out of a release date, and are looking to close that gap even further in this next cycle. Kudos to LOINC team for another great job.

RELMA version 6.14 included some nice updates as well. A couple of tweaks will make a big difference to LOINC mappers. My favorites are the ability to exclude esoteric LOINC challenge tests from your search results and to include/exclude local terms from your mapping list that you’ve tagged with certain keywords. If you’re looking for help getting started with RELMA, check out LOINC Essentials, which has all of my best recommendations for using RELMA to map local codes to LOINC.

LOINC Award Honors Outstanding Contributors to Advancement of Health Data Interoperability

The highlight of the Lab LOINC Committee meeting for me was having the privilege of presenting our inaugural LOINC Award for Distinguished Contributions to two outstanding members of the LOINC community: J. Gilbert Hill, M.D., Ph.D., of Canada and Cindy Johns, MSA. This award honors individuals who have made sustained and enduring contributions that advance health data interoperability with LOINC.

Wrap-up

We’re excited about all the great new things happening in LOINC-land. Stay tuned, because we’re really excited about the possibilities in the year ahead.

P.S. LOINC is hiring! If you’d like an opportunity to make a global impact on health around the world, check out the open positions on the LOINC team.