Enhancement to MedlinePlus Connect Lab Test Responses

MedlinePlus Connect is a National Library of Medicine (NLM) service linking patient portals and electronic health record systems to context-relevant information from MedlinePlus. The Connect service returns relevant information for a patient’s specific diagnosis, medication, or lab test. In particular, since 2011 Connect has supported requests for lab test information using LOINC (Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes).

In April 2016, NLM released an enhancement to the responses to lab test queries. The response now names the source of the information and provides a short snippet of the content in addition to the hyperlinked title of the content page.

This contextual information was added to help end-users understand the differences between multiple links which will be useful as NLM expands its collection of lab test content. For example, responses will now include links to MedlinePlus health topics that are focused on lab tests.

The new format for the MedlinePlus Connect Web application includes the snippet (see A in Figure 1) and the source (see B in Figure 1). For the Web service, the response now includes the summary element (see A in Figure 2) and the author/name element (see B in Figure 2). These elements are already used in the responses to diagnosis and medication codes.

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