Archive for the ‘HL7 Basics’ Category

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

“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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]