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

LOINC (R) and SNOMED CT (R) 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 (R) and SNOMED CT (R) 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 (R) and SNOMED CT (R) efficiently and (ii) we demonstrated the benefits of the SNOMED CT (R) conceptual hierarchy and tests model to query data initially coded in LOINC (R).