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ELINCS: A National Standards Project
for Lab-to-EHR Interoperability


Sujansky & Associates is leading the technical specification of a national non-proprietary standard for reporting lab results to electronic health records. The new standard, called ELINCS (EHR-Lab Interoperability and Connectivity Standard), is based on HL7 version 2.5.1.

The project is sponsored by the California HealthCare Foundation and includes participation from national laboratories and EHR vendors, as well as HIMSS, HL7, and CMS. In 2008, ELINCS was successfully balloted in HL7 as a standard implementation guide for ambulatory lab reporting. The standard is now owned and maintained by HL7


Sujansky & Associates' role in this project included:

  • Coordination of a multi-disciplinary technical working group
  • Analysis of the relevant requirements and use cases
  • Technical documentation of the standard specification
  • Design of a software tool for testing ELINCS interfaces
  • Technical support for implementations of ELINCS
  • Communication with industry trade groups and industry press

Relevant documents:

ELINCS Overview (PDF)
ELINCS FAQ (Web page)
ELINCS Standard Specification v1.1 (PDF)
A Highly Constrained HL7 Implementation Guide (JAMIA Article) (Web page)
More information about this project is available at www.ELINCS.org.




 

Highlights

ELINCS was successfully balloted by HL7 as a standard interchange specification for lab reporting.

The project team included representatives of LabCorp, Quest Diagnostics, AllScripts, e-MDs, GE Healthcare, NextGen, and Sage.

ELINCS has gained recognition by the American Clinical Laboratory Association.

Sujansky & Associates has presented overviews of ELINCS to the American Health Information Community (AHIC), G2 Lab Institute, Certification Commission for Health Information Technology, and the Medical Records Institute Conference.