LOINC Web Services

In my previous post, I showed how a simple web service (using REST) can be used to retrieve information about a LOINC code from a remote public server. In the "Smart Dataset-XML Viewer", when the user hovers the mouse over a LOINC code, additional information about that LOINC code is displayed as a tooltip. I now extended this principle to connect to a webservice from the National Library of Medicine, named MedLinePlus Connect. What the webservice is however returning is snippet of XML containing a reference to a website that contains a lot of explanation about the given test. The way I implemented this is such that when the user right-clicks a LOINC code in the "Smart Dataset-XML Viewer", the MedLinePlus webservice is called, the website reference is retrieved, and the user's default browser is opened with the given URL. So when I right-click "3094-0" in the viewer, a new browser window pops up, giving me the MedLinePlus information about the corresponding "Blood Urea Nitrogen" (BUN) test:

 Cool isn't it?

Is this rocket science? No, not at all, it only costed me 3 hours (including writing this blog) to implement this in the "Smart Dataset-XML Viewer".

MedlinePlus also has similar web services for SNOMED-CT, ICD-9 and ICD-10, and medications (RXCUI).So what I want to do in the next few days is to see whether we can implement more of these web services in the "Smart Dataset-XML Viewer".