Archive for the ‘What is HL7?’ Category

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 [...]

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 [...]

HL7 terms to better understand what is HL7. In the HL7 standard, Billing Account Record (BAR) messages are used to add or change the patient’s billing account information. Outlined below are the trigger events used to transmit clinical information to the billing accounts. BAR^P01:  Establishes a patient’s account in billing (usually sent from a registration [...]

HL7 terms to better understand what is HL7. In the HL7 standard, the message type, RDE (Pharmacy/Treatment Encoded Order Message), is used by clinical applications to send an order to the pharmacy and/or dispensing systems. It may be sent as either an order containing a single pharmacy/treatment order for a patient or as an order [...]

HL7 terms to better understand what is HL7. The Producer’s ID in HL7 v2.x is a specific field of the OBX segment. This field (OBX-15) contains a unique identifier of the responsible producing service provider. In the HL7 standard, there are messages used to communicate orders and results for procedures like lab tests, x-rays, etc. [...]

HL7 terms to better understand what is HL7. In HL7 v2.x, the OBX is a segment used to transmit a single observation or observation fragment. It represents the smallest indivisible unit of a report. The principal mission of an OBX is to carry information about observations and results in HL7 standard report messages (i.e., ORU [...]

Mapping HL7 messages with an HL7 engine In a prior post, I described the motivation for mapping HL7 messages. As described in that post, the HL7 2.X messaging standard is the most widely used method to move healthcare information yet the details of the messages vary greatly from system to system. An HL7 engine provides several [...]

HL7 typically involves moving message data between two or more software applications within a clinical setting. Without a standard way of defining the types of data that can be sent, messaging is very difficult. Therefore, HL7 outlines the data model and workflows that are broadly supported. What is HL7? For the Record magazine published a [...]

HL7 users include clinical application analysts, integration specialists, application programmers and systems analysts. These are the unsung heroes of connecting healthcare initiatives.

Discussion about the HL7 clinical data standard Competing healthcare integration standards cause much confusion for users. The HL7 clinical data standard has been growing and changing for a very long time and it continues to do so with new releases of HL7 of 2.X (“recently” 2.5 and “soon” HL7 2.5.1 and even 2.6) and “soon” [...]