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Normalize COVID-19 Testing Names to LOINC Codes

Introduction

To efficiently conduct clinical studies across different institutions within a network, one requirement is to normalize clinical data to common data models (CDM) and standard terminologies. Among different types of clinical data, COVID-19 diagnostic testings are extremely important for all the following analyses, as they are the primary means to identify the confirmed COVID-19 cases. To address the urgency of the pandemic, individual institutions have created local names and local codes for those new COVID-19 testings in their EHRs. Meanwhile, LOINC (The standard code system for laboratory observations), a widely used international standard for lab tests, has responded quickly by developing a new set of standard codes for COVID-19 testings, to guide standard coding of COVID-19 testings in clinical settings. Nevertheless, there is a lack of mappings between local COVID-19 testing names and standard LOINC codes, which hampers cross-institutional studies that rely on normalized clinical data at each institution.

Therefore, we developed an automated tool - COVID-19 TestNorm, to normalize a local COVID-19 testing name to a standard LOINC code. We believe COVID-19 TestNorm will be a useful tool for secondary use of EHRs for the pandemic, thus facilitating the global research of COVID-19. This tool is available to the community via an open source package at GitHub (Link).

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