LOINC is the international standard for coding diagnostic test results. The LOINC database contain over 40,000 codes and test panels and is widely adopted across the world
With the advent of Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission (ABDM), India has started its journey to move towards interoperable health records. One of the key steps in that journey is to enable labs in India to include the LOINC code as part of their test results.
Lab Information Management Systems (LIMS) are software used by labs to manage their test results. LOINC coding needs to be incorporated into LIMS with all the tests being offered by a lab being tagged with the correct LOINC code. The challenge here includes the fact the the names and abbrevations for tests used in India varies with what is in LOINC. Also India mostly uses about 2500+ tests and finding the right from from the 40000+ LOINC database requires expertize and is time consuming.
LOINC India is a community initiative to create a curated LOINC dataset for India and provide supporting tools that LIMS providers can leverage to incorporate LOINC into their systems.