Please see the following email for DRONC’s response regarding our concerns and 
questions with the CDM lab normal range table.

Thanks,

Mei

From: Keith Marsolo <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, July 30, 2020 12:10 PM
To: Mei Liu <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Follow up on the Data WG Meeting 7/17
Importance: High

Hi Mei.

We ask for all labs for a couple of reasons.  The first is that it allows us to 
get a sense of the “universe” of lab data across the PCORnet, and allows us to 
track the network’s improvement in mapping labs to LOINC.  The second reason is 
that we get requests from outside investigators / sponsors about potential 
projects that require lab data.  Through the data curation results, we can 
determine which sites have records using LOINC codes, and having all labs 
allows us to look at the RAW_NAME to determine if the records are potentially 
available and just not mapped.  Going forward, we’ve been working with the NLM 
on queries to better assess the quality of lab data mappings, which will be 
more effective if applied to all labs.

For the 2nd question, it’s really about normal ranges and units.  We can’t 
really query lab data without units, because while we could potentially guess 
at the unit, we’d have to trust that the LOINC code is correct, and we still 
discover instances where labs have incorrect LOINC codes.  With normal ranges, 
we haven’t done a ton of work with them yet because we’re still relatively new 
at querying labs, but they can be very helpful in assigning thresholds or cut 
points.  Many vary by age/race/gender, so understanding that site-level 
variation is helpful during analysis.

Hope that helps.  Let me know if there are other questions.

Keith



On Jul 27, 2020, at 10:54 AM, Mei Liu <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> 
wrote:

Hi Keith,

After the Data WG meeting on 7/17, GPC sites had an internal discussion on the 
feasibility of creating a reference range look-up table for labs. Our major 
concern is that it may not be feasible for sites like Intermountain Health and 
IU/Regenstrief in our network to create such table because they have numerous 
hospitals that use different lab facilities resulting in inconsistent lab 
normal ranges. Intermountain had a unique case where their central lab lost a 
section of historic normal range data when they upgraded software, resulting in 
78% complete on normal ranges whereas their usual coverage of Lab Normal ranges 
for quantitative labs is ~95%. So, that gap will fill in and completeness 
should be back above 80% over time.

GPC sites would like the DRNOC to clarify the following two questions:

  1.  Since we have been asked to dump all lab data into CDM, it would be 
useful if the DRNOC could articulate why it seems useful – or have they found 
it useful in practice – to ask for every site’s entire lab data holdings.
  2.  Why are these Lab Normal tables in the CDM needed?

Thank you!

Mei
-------------------------------------------------
Mei Liu, PhD
Associate Professor
Department of Internal Medicine
Division of Medical Informatics
University of Kansas Medical Center
Office: 913-945-6446
Fax: 913-588-4880

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