Overview

Healthcare providers are facing a daunting challenge: to provide the best clinical patient care while reducing costs. Adoption of HL7 message protocols provides a valuable resource to help overcome these challenges. HL7 is an ANSI accredited standards organization which publishes specification for the electronic exchange of administrative, clinical, and financial information, among independent healthcare-oriented systems. These standards allow provider health care organizations to pick the best of breed systems for patient care or clinical lab and be able to integrate them together. However, implementation of HL7 is not plug-n-play because each organization and department has its own specific business needs. These needs translate into custom requirements which must be properly complied with, documented, and communicated for the various systems to function properly. Edifecs products with HL7 support provide an easy way to capture, document and maintain these requirements and ensure that the wire message complies against these requirements.

Comprehensive Standards Support

The Edifecs HL7 solution supports all HL7 2.x versions which are currently released (2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.3.1, 2.4 and 2.5). For each version all event message types are supported. Support for the new HL7 2.x versions, such as 2.6, will be provided in the Edifecs products, when they are released by HL7. This dedicated support allows healthcare organizations and enterprise application integration (EAI) vendors using the Edifecs HL7 solution to offload many of the maintenance issues associated with upgrading from one HL7 version to another. Edifecs also maintains and provides many of the medical and non-medical external code sets which are referenced in the HL7 messages, such as diagnosis codes and procedure codes. Coupled with the support for EDI and other healthcare standards like HIPAA and NCPDP, Edifecs has become a single source for its class of solutions.

Easy Run-Time Integration

Edifecs XEngine is a run-time solution which is tightly integrated into an existing process workflow such as with an EAI server or as a standalone server. XEngine is multi-threaded providing robust performance and scalability. XEngine HL7 offers the following key advantages:

1. Ensure full operational integrity of your data by validating HL7 messages for syntax, semantics and company specific business rules defined in SpecBuilder.
2. Provides full support for user defined variations such as Z-segments, custom data types and more.
3. Bi-directional conversion of any HL7 2.x pipe and hat format to the official HL7 2.x XML format. This includes full validation of HL7 2.x XML data to the HL7 message specifications.
4. Automatically creates all required HL7 acknowledgements and fully adheres to HL7 rules for original mode acknowledgements.
5. Full support HL7 file and batch level envelopes.
6. The HL7 message information once parsed and validated through XEngine, can be used in conjunction with integration brokers to integrate HL7 messages with other information and application systems.
7. The Edifecs XEngine HL7 adapter is a multi-threaded high performance engine and runs on a variety of platform and operating systems.

Key Benefits

• Comprehensive Standards Support
• Powerful Editor with Compliance Checking
• Fast, easy and seamless integration through a COM or Java API or standalone server.
• Standalone server includes connectors to IBM.
• Websphere MQ, Java messaging server (JMS) or folder.

Testing with Edifecs

Edifecs supports HL7 testing through Compliance Online. HL7 messages, along with other Healthcare EDI transactions like NCPDP or HIPAA are available through www.edifecs.com. Log in to Edifecs Compliance Online using the tab above.

Powerful Interface Editor with Compliance Checking

The Edifecs SpecBuilder design-time tool provides a single integrated development and QA environment that dramatically simplifies and expedites creating, editing, publishing, and analyzing HL7 specifications.

Edit: With the SpecBuilder Editor you can start with a message form the standards library and quickly annotate it to reflect your compliance needs. With multiple user notes, you can maintain a single source for specification and still meet the needs of various audiences such as map developers and business analysts.

Publish: SpecBuilder test data generation allows users to generate test data and scenarios, testing the interfaces of messages that will be exchanged between the sender and receiver systems.

Generate Test Data: SpecBuilder test data generation allows users to generate test data and scenarios, testing the interface of messages that will be exchanged between the sender and receiver systems.

Migrate: With SpecBuilder comparison and migration component you can easily stay aligned with the new standard revisions. By selectively choosing what to compare and what to ignore, you can quickly perform gap analysis to share with your team and focus opn the items that will have the most impact on your implementation.

Export: SpecBuilder allows the user to export the customized message specification to multiple different formats including W3C XML Schema which conforms to the HL7 2.x XML encoding standard.

Analyze: The SpecBuilder desktop analyzer provides a powerful debugging environment with detailed error reports, making it easy to analyze, track, and fix data errors in HL7 messages. You can simultaneously navigate a data file, error report and specs all linked together in an intuitive graphical environment. SpecBuilder data analyzer performs both business-rule and syntax-rule validation.