Accelerating EMR Interoperability with ELINCS
Streamlining Lab Connectivity to Physician EMRs
What is ELINCS?
The EHR-Lab Interoperability and Connectivity Standards (ELINCS) project involves work with vendors, major clinical laboratories and other stakeholders – including HL7 – to develop a national clinical data standard that is seamlessly adoptable by those utilizing other existing standards. It is a practical, real-world solution to solve the business problem of sending electronic reports between labs and ambulatory care units.
ELINCS was developed by the California HealthCare Foundation (CHCF) to standardize the transmission of electronic results from a laboratory information system (LIS) to a physician’s electronic medical record (EMR) system. Once in the EMR system, the results can be integrated with the patient’s EMR or EHR (electronic health record) and reviewed with the patient’s medical history.
The ELINCS project was taken over by CHCF when the Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology (ONCHIT) asked that they lead the development of an ELINCS implementation guide. It should be noted that the CHCF had already successfully developed an implementation guide for the batch reporting of lab results in California (CALINX).
ELINCS relies on HL7 and uses LOINC (Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes) as a way to standardize the laboratory observation terms. There are more than 40,000 codes available in LOINC, so ELINCS focuses only on those codes that are of largest value in an ambulatory care setting.
While only a fraction of the available tests are covered under the ELINCS standard, those that are covered represent 80% of the physician interests. Currently, ELINCS is used only for electronic results from labs to EMR systems at the application level, focusing on the piece most crucial to physicians.
ELINCS and EMR systems
Many physicians today still rely on traditional paper records to view lab or test results. But increasingly, physicians are adopting EMR systems and finding that they provide a far more efficient and productive method of viewing patient information – including results from the lab.An EMR system’s value increases dramatically when real-time transmission of electronic lab results occurs, providing a more complete patient profile in the EMR. Electronic integration is a faster, more accurate method to transmit results to your community of physicians because it replaces time-consuming manual entry and delivery, and minimizes the possibility of human error.
As more EMR systems are adopted by physician offices, more laboratory service providers are receiving requests to send results electronically to an EMR system. Fulfilling this request for multiple EMR systems can be facilitated by integration with the ELINCS standard. When both the lab and the EMR system are integrated with ELINCS, new connections can get up and running quickly without having to configure a custom interface.
It is predicted that the ELINCS standard will ultimately expand the use of electronic medical records in physician practices and make electronic connectivity to labs less complex. Beginning in the spring of 2007, all new EMR/EHR systems seeking CCHIT (Certification Commission for Healthcare Information Technology) certification will be required to support the ELINCS v1.1 standard. Consequently, LIS vendors and labs need to consider adopting ELINCS.
Who Uses ELINCS?
ELINCS is used by commercial labs and hospitals that need to send electronic results from their laboratory information system to ambulatory care providers’ EMR systems ________________________________________________________________________ To download a complete PDF version of Accelerating EMR Interoperability with ELINCS, follow the attachment below.| Attachment | Size |
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