A pretty basic question here… am I missing anything, or are there no dates at all to tie to the LOINC version numbers. I am trying to just do some analysis in our DBs as far as when certain datasets data were last updated, and right now I’m not seeing anything that can tell me “2.72” was released on a certain date, to make sure we have a version in place within a certain timeframe.
If I’m not missing anything and this isn’t anywhere in the downloads, could that be added at some point, version numbers and date released?
You are correct, date information is not provided within the release file(s) but you can find associated dates for each LOINC release here. https://loinc.org/history/
It isn’t very “easy” to update with that page though, especially if you are attempting to automate updates.
Ours are still fairly manual updating from LOINC since it only updates twice a year anyway (vs. other things like NPI numbers or Drug DB data, etc), so, it is somewhat less and issue here, in that as part of the process we could update our own table, but, if we did try to make it a daily/weekly process that looked for “new” files at loinc.org to download, we wouldn’t have a good file in the group of files downloaded that had simply version numbers and dates, which is really all that is needed.
Yes, ideally there would be a dataset in the file downloads with version numbers and their release dates. Just as a programatic thing to be able to determine “Do we have a LOINC version loaded in that is within 7 months old” (and if we don’t , we know something is “wrong”). That is the issue with right now only a version number in the DB files we import.
