Usability and Improvement of Existing Alignments: The LOINC-SNOMED CT Case Study

Abstract : LOINC® and SNOMED CT® are two of the most used biomedical terminology standards to conjointly describe medical laboratory data into patient Electronic Health Records. The institutions owning them entered in a collaboration 4 years ago. The intention was to provide alignments between LOINC® and SNOMED CT® in order to improve query and aggregation of patient data. This work brings input on the LOINC—SNOMED CT alignment effort: (i) we developed algorithms aiding to align LOINC® and SNOMED CT® efficiently and (ii) we demonstrated the benefits of the SNOMED CT® conceptual hierarchy and tests model to query data initially coded in LOINC®.