Posting a good email discussion about mapping urine panels with “collection duration”…any additional input is welcome.
Hi folks,
I have a general question about urine panels.
At Partners, if we see “collection duration” as a part of the panel, we believe this means that the specimen can be 24 hour or some other time frame and map to terms in LOINC with an XXX time aspect when they are available. If not available, we create internal codes for the tests.
Is this a legitimate interpretation of these panels? Should I map these as 24 hour based on the order name and not be concerned about the fact that other collections are acceptable? Please comment.
Thanks,
Susan Korsak MT, MIS
Reply 1:
My first question would be whether the results are normalized to a 24-hour urine pattern. In that case you have two scenarios, the actual specimen collection data and then the test panel results. My experience (although many, many years ago) in the clinical lab was that it was infrequent that we got “exactly” 24-hour urines. It would range anywhere from 15-30 hours depending on when they got the samples. We would then extrapolate from the results what the 24-hour values would be based on the time and the volume, normalized to 24-hours.
In that case we would still order and result a 24-hour panel. But again, the caveat is that this was my experience form a long time ago.
James T. Case M.S., D.V.M., Ph.D., FHL7
Reply 2:
Hi All,
I agree with Jim. In my current experience, the test order is for a 24-hour urine specimen, so I normally map these using the LOINC codes for 24-hour urines specimens since we report them based on a 24-hour urine collection, even though it’s not all that common to get one collected for exactly 24-hours. What we do is to take the beginning and ending collection times and then normalize the 24-hour results based on the actual collection time. So I think that things haven’t changed much over the years with these…
Cindy Johns, MSA, MASCP, MLS(ASCP)CMSHCM
Reply 3:
Thanks… This is very helpful. Based on some examples I have, the normalization to a 24 hour urine still occurs.
