The challenging process of refreshing, distributing, and maintaining the Reportable Condition Mapping Table (RCMT) will be examined from three perspectives by representatives from a State Public Health Department, the CDC CSTE ELR Task Force, and a Standards Development Organization (LOINC).

The RCMTs will provide mappings between reportable conditions and their associated LOINC laboratory tests and their SNOMED results. These are standards suggested by Meaningful Use for “reportable lab result reporting to public health”. This collaborative effort is driven by the Electronic Laboratory Reporting (ELR) Standards Workgroup (part of the CSTE/CDC Joint ELR Task Force), CDC Centers of Excellence, SDOs (LOINC and SNOMED), and members of several public health communities of practice (VMCoP, CRSWg, LMCoP). This effort has successfully engaged a wide range of stakeholders in public review and comment of the RCMTs, including subject matter experts in laboratory medicine, epidemiology, infection prevention, and informatics.

The first panelist will provide a State Public Health Department perspective in presenting the challenges and lessons learned in mapping laboratory vocabulary standards (LOINC and SNOMED) and integration with MEDSS (Minnesota Disease Surveillance System). Minnesota Department of Health transitioned ELR to a new disease surveillance system in November 2010.  This new system uses Test Code/Result matches to identify diseases contained in the report and for routing to the appropriate epidemiologic program area.

The second panelist from CDC CSTE ELR Task Force will describe work done to renew – and plans to maintain – the RCMTs.  The collaborative process including weekly reviews with the public health community (laboratory SMEs, CDC programs, epidemiologists) will be showcased.  Plans for distribution via the CDC vocabulary server PHIN VADS (web services and download) and role of the RCMTs in the development of a reportable conditions knowledgebase will be presented.

The third panelist from Regenstrief Institute will summarize the role of an SDO (LOINC) in this effort.  In addition to participating in weekly public review meetings and adding new LOINC codes as needed to the database, a proposal is being considered to integrate the RCMTs into RELMA – a free LOINC mapping tool.