Question: LOINC code for smoking start date

Dec 10, 2017

Question:

My team is currently working with FHIR DSTU2, and part of the project that we are working on requires  SMOKING information, particularly the date the patient started smoking.  Part of this work is also mapping this particular information to LOINC, and basically our issue is that we are unable to find anything that refers to a patient’s smoking start date in LOINC.  What would be your suggested work around for the above?

We did find quit date, which good - just not start date.

Answer:

Well, there’s no LOINC code to match 74010-0 (Date quit tobacco smoking). So the best option is to make up your own code, and propose that LOINC add a matching code, then change to use that once that’s done.

You can propose new LOINC codes here: https://loinc.org/submissions/