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Archive for the ‘HL7 Basics’ Category

Is HL7 Still Meaningful?

Thursday, May 10th, 2012 by

HITECH. Meaningful Use. HIE. IHE. Many words and acronyms, but there is one often overlooked — Health Level Seven or HL7. While HITECH and Meaningful Use, Stage 1, primarily focused on get certified EHRs installed and operational, lingering in Stage 2 is actually exchanging patient data. Health Information Exchanges, or HIEs, are receiving a lot [...]

Interface Documentation: Huh? What? Come Again?

Tuesday, September 20th, 2011 by

As a service provider, you might have requested documentation from a vendor. As a vendor, you may be searching for documentation regarding a specific client install. Either way, you are looking for some information that helps you do your job (i.e., implementing, supporting, changing or fixing an interface). To that end, what is the documentation [...]

Philosophical and Structural Differences between HL7 and X12

Tuesday, April 12th, 2011 by

As healthcare IT professionals, we read HL7 messages every day. Terms like PV1-5 and MSH-10 are second nature. However, ISA-15 and ST-3 might not be as familiar. These come from the X12 specification, which is heavily used in supply chain management (purchase orders, invoices, advance shipping notices, etc). X12 goes beyond supply chain, however, and [...]

What three things should everyone know about working with HL7 standards?

Thursday, July 29th, 2010 by

For system analysts and interface developers, testing and managing HL7 interface connections is a large part of day-to-day responsibilities. Therefore, knowing and understanding the nature of HL7 messages and its structure is helpful in optimizing the time and money invested in the interfacing process. Senior implementations consultant at Corepoint Health, Alex Lin, identifies his top [...]

Poll Results: Which HL7 Version Do You Encounter the Most in Your Interfacing Projects?

Friday, December 4th, 2009 by

Not surprisingly, the poll results offer some insight into the challenges awaiting greater HL7 v3 implementation. 90% of respondents indicated they most encounter HL7 v2.x.

New Polling Feature Added to HL7Standards.com

Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 by

We are excited to introduce polling to www.hl7standards.com. You can participate and vote either on the home page or below the sponsor ads. New polls will be added bi-monthly, and the results can be viewed after participating in the poll or clicking the “View Results” link at the bottom of the poll. The current poll [...]

Wes Rishel on SOA

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 by

“Simplicity is drawn from the complexity of problems. Once you ultimately deal with the complexity, the simple solution is no longer simple.” – Wes Rishel This week I’m attending the SOA in Healthcare Conference co-sponsored by HL7 and OMG. As you might guess by the title, the meeting is focused on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) use within healthcare [...]

Real World Example of HL7 Time Zone Qualification — Impact of Daylight Savings Time

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 by

Timezones are qualified with an hour and minute offset from GMT and not with a flag indicating daylight savings time. There is no method or technique in HL7 to indicate if the time given in the message is daylight savings time or not. I previously wrote about the challenges of time zone qualification within an [...]

Continuity of Care Document for Clinical Data Exchange

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 by

Prior to the approval of the Continuity of Care Document (CCD) as an ANSI Standard in 2007, electronic clinical document exchange could utilize one of two formats: HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) or ASTM Continuity of Care Record (CCR). In an effort to combine the two closely related formats, the Continuity of Care Document was [...]

HL7 Dates and Times

Friday, July 25th, 2008 by

Moving dates and times between systems via HL7 has two primary challenges: Clock skew/drift — the systems don’t agree on the definition of “now” Time zones — the systems differ in their offset from UTC/GMT While both problems are easy to understand, the two challenges are solved in very different ways. Here is a summary [...]