Quality Alliance recommends ELINCS and LOINC as a Lab Results Solution

Recommendation: Promote adoption and use of technical coding/terminology and lab data interchange standards.

•A collaborative of public and private organizations is needed to identify a “starter set” of LOINC® codes for the top 200–300 lab test codes in use across the country and to promote its broad adoption and use.
•A large-scale collaboration between ONC, the National Library of Medicine, and private sector organizations should strongly encourage the adoption and use of standards, such as LOINC® and the EHR-Lab Interoperability and Connectivity Specification (ELINCS), that align with standards supporting health IT and meaningful use.
•Medicare and commercial contracts should make incentives available to lab vendors to adopt and use LOINC®.

Full Report is available here.

2011 Listing of Laboratory to Physician Office Link Software

Every year CAP Today magazine posts a listing of the leading vendors for Physician office link software. This year there are 23 vendors.

Click here to view vendor listing.

SmartlinkEMR Saves Staff Time

SmartlinkEMR in action at a physician practice in Carmel, Indiana.

At this implementation, the application aggregates reports from the Indiana Health Information Exchange (IHIE), LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics into a single database providing a one stop Patient Diagnostics Information System. Office staff are able to find patient reports in seconds instead of many minutes saving them chunks of time throughout the day.

The time savings from office staff is incredible as they report at least two to three hours saved in each workday.

ELINCS Lab Orders Specification Released for Public Comment

In March 2011 the California HealthCare Foundation, in collaboration with a multi-stakeholder group, completed a draft version of the ELINCS Orders specification. Public comments were accepted through April 11, 2011. The final specification will be published in summer 2011.
Click here to view the draft specification.