This article is for those IT professionals like myself that work in the health care industry, that have not experienced HL7. Industry standard will show you that HL7 is a must when dealing with patient information. Due to HIPPA requirements HL7 is important to post patient information between multiple systems in a secure environment. In the data driven world that we as a society live in the need to keep data consistent and secure between multiple systems is growing. As a developer for the BSO, the technology of HL7 is very important for our health care customer(s). This type of technology is important to keep up to date so our health care customer(s) can provide adequate care to their patients/clients.
When beginning to look at HL7 documentation you’ll see that to the untrained developer it’s just a pipe delimited file. But to someone who has to deal with HL7 on a daily basis it means much more than that. When beginning to learn about the technology behind HL7 you’ll come to understand that each system you need to integrate with has different requirements and the data integration to those interfaces are handed differently. Each field in HL7 is important to the consistency of data for the patient, if fields are not passed to the interface correctly the potential to create “phantom records” increases dramatically. With my experience “phantom records” is the most crucial part for working with HL7, and defining the UIDs (unique identifiers) for each patient/client is the most important part when defining your HL7 messages between health care systems. When “phantom records” are created it creates two/or more records for a particular patient in the interfacing system. This can create a tremendous amount of data drilling/mining/checking on the clinicians to make sure the data that came over the HL7 post was valid. In the chance that data did not come across correctly could increase the chance that may potentially hinder patient care, due to the inconsistent data that was posted.
When HL7 is sent to different systems, in most cases, it’s sent using IP and port, which through network traffic on the network of the health care provider is relatively secure. When trying to get a grip on how to write/modify/read HL7 most interfaces will provide documentation, this is the central point or “bible” for you during the process of integrating two interfaces. Without diligent documentation from the interface provider integrating into the interface would be a painful nightmare. Each field in the HL7 segment is important, and each field has the potential to save a lot of time on the clinician’s behalf. Also with HL7 the messages can also be sent real-time with no need to have a process that runs nightly or during a scheduled task on a predefined interval. This can greatly speed up the efficiency and care of the patient/client.
In my experiences with HL7, it’s been a tremendous challenge, but I really do enjoy providing integration between multiple systems, and seeing the happiness on the clinicians faces of surprise and excitement when they realize they do not have to spend time to input the patients/client data into their health care system(s).