A laboratory to your service

LRC has completed the mapping of its catalogue to LOINC codes with the purpose to facilitate the exchange of clinical results for clinical care by providing a set of universal codes and names to identify laboratory and other clinical observations.

LOINC is a voluntary effort housed in the Regenstrief Institute, an internationally respected non-profit medical research organization associated with Indiana University. LOINC was initiated in 1994 by the Regenstrief Institute and developed by Regenstrief and the LOINC committee as a response to the demand for electronic movement of clinical data from laboratories that produce the data to hospitals, physician's offices, and payers who use the data for clinical care and management purposes.
The purpose of the LOINC® database is to facilitate the exchange and pooling of results for clinical care, outcomes management, and research. Currently, most laboratories and clinical services use HL7 to send their results electronically from their reporting systems to their care systems. However, the tests in these messages are identified by means of their internal code values. Thus, the care system cannot fully "understand" and properly file the results they receive unless they either adopt the producer's laboratory codes (which is impossible if they receive results from multiple sources), or invest in the work to map each result producer's code system to their internal code system. LOINC codes are universal identifiers for laboratory and other clinical observations that solve this problem.