Implementing the ELINCS Standard: Technical Experience from the Field

Publication Date: October 2007

Publisher: California HealthCare Foundation

Author(s):

Research Area: Health

Type: Brief

Coverage: California

Abstract:

In February 2006, the California HealthCare Foundation funded five pilot projects across California to implement ELINCS v1.0 in live clinical settings. The testing sites included two national labs, several smaller labs, and five different EHR or chronic disease registry systems. This issue brief details the results of the pilot implementations. The project helped to identify several important challenges in adopting the ELINCS standard, including the need to learn new coding schemes, the lack of a standard for message transport, and difficulty in resolving incompatible data fields. By the end of the project, four of the five pilot sites had successfully implemented ELINCS and were using it to transmit their lab test results. The feedback they provided helped to validate ELINCS v1.0 and to inform the minor changes incorporated into ELINCS v1.1 (released in October 2006).