The CDC sponsored Lab Interoperabilty Cooperative (LIC) goal is to provide an array of services to hospital labs to enable submission of reportable lab results to public health agencies as defined in the final rules for Meaningful Use. This panel updates attendees with lessons learned from the LIC lab recruitment process. Highlights will include the review of the current project status and issues related to the collection and messaging of LOINC encoded structured lab data.

Technical and content standards exist to enable the secure, electronic exchange of lab results. Currently the national implementation and sharing of these standards by commercial labs, hospitals and providers has been limited for public health reporting.  The Lab Interoperability Cooperative (LIC) is a 2 year CDC sponsored grant launched in February 2011 comprised of teams from the American Hospital Association, the College of American Pathologists and Surescripts. The LIC’s primary goal is to provide a variety of services to hospital labs to facilitate/enable the electronic submission of reportable lab results directly to public health agencies as defined in the Meaningful Use final rules. This presentation will describe the LIC timeline from lab recruitment (inpatient hospital labs including critical access hospitals) to actual connectivity and implementation. Issues and challenges of moving from paper based reporting to real time results messaging including the use of standardized terminology (LOINC) will be highlighted.