The purpose is to facilitate the exchange and pooling of results, such as blood hemoglobin, serum potassium, or vital signs, for clinical care, outcomes management, and research. Currently, many laboratories are using HL7 or its sister standard, ASTM 1238, to send laboratory results electronically from producer laboratories to clinical care systems in hospitals. The database includes fields for each of the six parts of the name. The latest version of the database can be downloaded from the website.
Antibiotic susceptibilities are a separate category.
Table 18 in the User's Guide lists all of classes in the database. There are fields in the database for a number of data elements, such as, typical units, sample normal ranges, but most of those fields are not yet filled in. In a few cases, we have suggested standard answer lists for tests whose results are usually reported as codes. For some kinds of tests and observations, the database allows for several approaches to reporting values. Please see the User's Guide for more examples.