Hi Marc,

Great questions!

pCLOCD provides the following benefits that LOINC does not offer:

• Removal of all non-metric tests, making mapping tasks less challenging
• Standardized Pan-Canadian Component Names and Viewer names (clinician friendly)
• Recommended units of measure
• Change History, providing detail information about the changes to each code from version to version. Change is done once by Infoway and then leveraged by all implementers rather than having each implementer go through each LOINC release to find the changes.
• XCA codes – Pan-Canadian codes
• LOINC Submission Status, providing the latest status of the code & XCA Cross Reference information, these are two fields that have been identified as helpful by implementers.

As for OIDs, when referring to LOINC the OID for LOINC is used. When refering to use pCLOCD the OID for pCLOCD is used.

Our recent Introduction to pCLOCD presentation material also gives a high level overview of the strengths and benefits of pCLOCD.

Link for quick access to the presentation mentioned above via email: https://infocentral.infoway-inforoute.ca/en/component/edocman/presentations-and-videos/2483-introduction-to-loinc-and-pclocd

Hope this helps address your questions about the need for and value of pCLOCD.

Best,

Linda Monico
Product Specialist, Standards
Digital Health Marketing & Engagement Team

Hello,
Apologies, but I have forgotten why we need a whole separate code system from LOINC, complete with it's own OID. Why not just use LOINC and add/adjust designations as appropriate (as long as semantic meaning is retained)? This is done all the time, and the alternate designations are known as synonyms or aliases. I think there was a document about this once...

Thanks,
Marc L'Arrivee
Information Standards Specialist
Manitoba eHealth