LOINC Conference

Aggregated Lab Information Grouping Nomenclature (ALIGN) and LOINC: A trial in creating clinically relevant lab groupers

The Aggregated Lab Information Grouping Nomenclature (ALIGN) is a methods-driven, clinically curated lab grouping normative ontology that supports and simplifies analytical use cases for organizations that need to aggregate and derive insights from laboratory data from a variety of sources. ALIGN allows healthcare organizations to add clinically relevant grouping metadata to their lab result records to facilitate graphical trending, analytics, data exchange, note authoring, and other health IT system-dependent use cases.

Using ALIGN eliminates the need to self-develop grouping metadata. When used across a group of organizations, each organization benefits from the network effect of using the same set of lab grouping metadata to improve cross-facility research, analytics, and health information exchange.

Within ALIGN, we have created value sets that leverage LOINC terms. Each value set contains one or more LOINC lab terms depending on whether they share the same properties (e.g., analyte, system, time aspect, property, and method). These value sets are then rolled up to value set lab groups. The value set lab groups typically share only the same analyte and system and ignore the property. These lab values sets and value set groupers serve as a basis to which an organization can easily map local terms to the appropriate LOINC terms.

Speakers:

• Victor Lee – Vice President of Clinical Informatics, Clinical Architecture
• Lois Harry – Manager of Content Development, Clinical Architecture