Archive for the ‘HL7 Integration’ Category

A new term spreading (almost like fire) through the healthcare interoperability world is HL7 FHIR, pronounced as “fire.” Here are the Top 5 things I think you should know about this upcoming standard many hope will help solve many current issues in interoperability: FHIR stands for Fast Healthcare Interoperable Resource. FHIR combines the best features [...]

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 [...]

The IHE Connectathon event for 2012 was held in Chicago last week. Connectathon allows vendors from healthcare IT to test their ability to support IHE profiles, which are critical to standardizing communications across HIEs, ACOs, and across regions. Here are a few observations from my first-time participation at Connectathon: Industry Buy-in It was apparent from [...]

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 [...]

Jorge Grillo, who is CIO at Canton-Potsdam Hospital in Potsdam, NY, has been blogging on install Meditech 6.0. In his most excellent 11th installment (posted this week), he discussed two interesting points about integration: One challenge for us right now is getting the 6.x interfaces up and tested. Those of you on Magic with existing [...]

What job title or job description do you give someone who spends much of their time solving integration issues within a hospital setting? In my opinion it’s pretty telling to see what titles the staff desires — often a mix of two concepts. Specifically, a typical HL7-aware, integration engine user at a hospital builds a [...]

Software vendors in the healthcare space likely have interfaces in their systems that are capable of receiving HL7 2.x messages and processing that data through an application. In Part 1 of this series, I explained how a section in the xml allows developers to write applications to make use of the coded elements. (A patient’s [...]

When working through the complexities of a healthcare integration project or monitoring day to day operations within your existing interface environment, it is sometimes necessary to “dig in” to the discrete message data being moved between applications, whether it is HL7, XML, X12, NCPDP SCRIPT, etc.  For instance, there are scenarios common to healthcare integration [...]

As you read this, do you know the status of every clinical interface in your environment? Unfortunately, a common answer to this question may be, “I have not received a call from anybody, so everything must be fine.” What needs to be monitored in HL7 messaging? Some examples include: Guaranteed message delivery ACK vs NACK [...]

Clinical care facilities typically use a variety of complex software applications from differing vendors to accomplish every day operational tasks. Because these applications are created by different software teams, they need to be able to exchange data and do so via interfaces. There are several challenges to building an HL7 interface. Each individual interface requires [...]