This section lists the use cases for using catalogs of laboratory diagnostic services.

1. Laboratory catalog shared in pull mode: A clinical or pathology laboratory wishes to share its full compendium of diagnostic services with the healthcare professionals and organizations wishing to use these diagnostic services. It publishes it as a catalog of resources accessible online for discovery and retrieval. Consumers query the catalog online from their order entry application and retrieve the diagnostic services they want to insert into their orders to the laboratory for their patients. Implementation guidance for this use case is provided in the Searching and retrieving laboratory services section of the specification.
2. Subset of catalog imported by consumer: A consumer imports periodically the subset of the online laboratory catalog it is interested in, so as to have it available locally in its computerized physician order entry application. Implementation guidance for this use case is provided in the Searching and retrieving laboratory services section of the specification.
3. Catalog administration using the FHIR API: The laboratory maintains its compendium of services in a proprietary format, and delegates the standard publication of this compendium to an external organization operating an HL7 FHIR server of such catalogs. The application maintaining the laboratory compendium interacts with the FHIR server to keep the publication up to date, inserting, updating or retiring services into/from the FHIR catalog. Implementation guidance for this use case is provided in the Administering laboratory services section of the specification.
4. Sharing a common semantic master catalog: An organization exposes the set of standardized vocabularies needed to support full semantic interoperability for ordering and reporting laboratory services within a jurisdiction (e.g. a country). This reference set is represented as a generic catalog of all the laboratory services that are usable within the jurisdiction. This generic catalog is imported in whole or in parts by the applications of the ordering providers and of the laboratories of the jurisdiction. Implementation guidance for this use case is provided in the Searching and retrieving laboratory services section of the specification.
5. Customized catalog shared in push mode: The custodian of a laboratory catalog customizes its catalog for a particular group of consumers, and pushes this customized version to the information systems of each of these consumers. From that point, updates of this customized catalog are pushed to the same group of customers on a regular basis (for instance, weekly). Implementation guidance for this use case is provided in the Push interactions section of the specification.