LOINC Questionnaire definition

General
1

Hi Community,

Recently, I saw Questionnaire definition came long with LOINC Code, so I wonder if those definitions are available in the Release files or not (I am checking the file content right now, but still want to ask just in case).

Thank you very much,

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2

Hello @nhphong, within the Accessory Files folder of our release, there is a PanelsAndForms artifact which contains these collections. Is this what you are looking for?

Also, our Questionnaire resources are published in our Terminology Service using FHIR. LOINC Terminology Service using HL7® FHIR® – LOINC

3

Hi @timbriscoe, I found those files, thank for your info.

Have a good day,

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4

The contents in this directory are as follows:

  • PanelsAndForms.csv
  • Loinc.csv
  • AnswerList.csv
  • LoincAnswerListLink.csv
  • PanelsAndFormsReadMe.txt

Which file among them should contain the exhaustive list of questionnaire codes?

5

Hi @achattopadhyay - the PanelsAndForms.csv file is the one you will want to use for questionnaire codes.

6

Thanks a lot @timbriscoe . Could you also point me to any API that sends the same data?

I did hit the API that you directed to in your previous response, but received only 947 unique codes from item/code/code and code/code keys here: https://fhir.loinc.org/Questionnaire?_format=json, whereas 91993 unique LOINC codes are present under column F of “Panels and Forms.csv”.

Is the API response not fully updated yet? Or is there any limit set by default? I did not see any changes in the code set when I set a much larger limit to the API call explicitly (like 100000).

If I want to maintain a consistent database for my own organization that stores all the distinct questionnaire LOINC codes, what should be the best way forward if this reported inconsistency persists?

7

Hello again @achattopadhyay. This is a great question. The difference ultimately is structure. The PanelsAndForms.csv file contains all parents and their children of all LOINCs which have a hierarchical structure. These relationships can be rebuilt using this flat file. That’s why you see many rows in it.

The FHIR API endpoint should return the parents with the children represented underneath each. I believe that is why the counts are different. There may be a few items filtered out from our Questionnaire resource.

I would suggest using the PanelsAndForms.csv artifact as the go-to source. Our Terminology Service/API using FHIR has a Beta status and may change, especially with regard to Questionnaire. You may get non-survey content from the CSV file but you can filter that out.