Advances in data exchange for the clinical laboratory.

The focus of the article is on the nuts and bolts of those standards relevant to the exchange of data between a clinical laboratory and an electronic health record. These include: Health Level 7 (HL7), Logical Observation Identifier Names and Codes (LOINC), Systematized Nomenclature of Human and Veterinary Medicine (SNOMED), and, most recently, the Extensible Markup Language (XML).