Analysis of clinical specimens to obtain information about the health of a patient.

Data Element

Information from the submission form
Specimen Source Site
Description
Body location from where a specimen was obtained. Examples include but are not limited to right internal jugular, left arm, and right eye.
Submitted By: Nedra Garrett / Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
Data Element Information
Use Case Description(s)
Use Case Description Disease reporting to public health relies on data from the EHR for identification of reportable events and to provide critical information used in confirming a diagnosis, understanding severity and classifying a case of disease that requires public health intervention for prevention, treatment, control, and outbreak identification and response. The specimen collection date is of particular importance for public health in understanding when laboratory confirmable evidence of a disease process was present in the patient. Specimen type and specimen site provides information useful in interpreting laboratory findings to determine severity and transmissibility.
Estimated number of stakeholders capturing, accessing using or exchanging Over 3000 public health agencies in the US would use these data elements for disease surveillance and control activities.
Link to use case project page https://www.cdc.gov/elr/index.html
Healthcare Aims
  • Improving the health of populations
Maturity of Use and Technical Specifications for Data Element
Applicable Standard(s) LOINC
https://phinvads.cdc.gov/vads/SearchVocab.action
Additional Specifications N/A
Current Use Extensively used in production environments
Supporting Artifacts These are standard elements in HL7 laboratory messaging
https://www.cdc.gov/elr/index.html
Number of organizations/individuals with which this data element has been electronically exchanged 5 or more. This data element has been tested at scale between multiple different production environments to support the majority of anticipated stakeholders.
Supporting Artifacts These data elements are standard components of HL7 electronic test order and reporting (ETOR) messages between clinical setting and clinical laboratorories and of HL7 electronic laboratory reporting (ELR) messages sent from clinical laboratories to public health.
https://www.cdc.gov/elr/index.html
Potential Challenges
Restrictions on Standardization (e.g. proprietary code) None
Restrictions on Use (e.g. licensing, user fees) None
Privacy and Security Concerns None
Estimate of Overall Burden N/A
Other Implementation Challenges N/A

Comment

Submitted by hantran on 2022-09-30

CAP Comment on Specimen Source Site

Data Element: Specimen Source Site
  • Corresponding CLIA Reporting Requirement: Specimen source
  • Description: The College of American Pathologists (CAP) supports the inclusion of this Level 2 data element into USCDI v4 to align with CLIA’s Specimen Source reporting requirement. The CLIA requirements are required for laboratory reporting and should be used as the basis for laboratory and public health reporting standards. 
  • Vocabulary Standard: For the content of the data element, the CAP recommends replacing the LOINC standard with the SNOMED CT standard. LOINC does not adequately represent specimen types or anatomic locations and relationships necessary to represent specimens and their sources, and is not intended for that purpose. SNOMED CT is a relatively complete, well-curated, and actively-managed medical ontology that has excellent coverage of concepts appropriate for description of laboratory specimens and specimen sources, and supports a rich array of hierarchical and other concept relationships.

Submitted by Riki Merrick on 2022-09-30

APHL Comments on ISA 2022

APHL continues to support inclusion of this data element in the Laboratory class of USCDI V4; it is mentioned in CLIA as a “provide as appropriate” element.

Submitted by nedragarrett_CDC on 2021-09-29

Unified Comment from CDC

  • Additional Use Case: This is a standard data item used by central cancer registries in all states. Data received through data exchange from laboratories to central cancer registries for CDC and NCI’s national cancer surveillance systems, as required by law.    
  •  CSTE supports inclusion of this measure into USCDI v3: very useful for laboratory related fields context.

Submitted by Riki Merrick APHL on 2021-04-15

APHL comment to add into USCDIV2

This data element is critical in supporting specimentype information, when more generic types are submitted - for example a joint fuild sample or a tissue sample - rather than supporting a lot of pre-coordinated (and still potentially not detailed enough specimen types) use of source site allows for a clear identification of the sample's location - critical for treating infections and cancer for example. It has been included in V2 messages for a long time (OBR-15.4) and is an RE element in ELR R1.

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