Adopting a Robust HL7 Archiving Solution
Healthcare is one industry that continually evolves in terms of IT preferences and needs. Unfortunately, many of the technologies used in medical imaging storage and access solutions are complex, difficult to integrate, and costly to migrate data from old to new. When it comes to HL7, does it get any easier?
Health Level-7, or HL7, refers to a standard for transfer of clinical and administrative data between software applications in healthcare. The 7 comes from the application layer in the OSI model. The design of HL7 is focused on simplicity and ease of implementation. It’s also focused on fast healthcare interoperability resources. The premier messaging standard for exchange of patient care and clinical information is now HL7 Version 2.
What the IT healthcare professionals have come to know is that HL7 protocol is among the most widely implemented standards when it comes to exchanging data between systems. This can mean financial management information, patient administration information, scheduling, coding, and clinical automation, among others. Most providers today can only try to pull their HL7 data from proprietary interfaces, extract the information from all applications in the database, and store various bits of data in a database for later analysis – a process that most IT professionals can attest to being labor intensive and inefficient at best.
The prime objective of HL7 is to make it simple to implement interfaces between software applications of various vendors, which can reduce the amount of trouble involved in custom interface programming. Before the advent of HL7, the data exchange between systems was performed through customized interfacing systems, which of course were expensive and conformed to no particular standard.
Around 90 percent of healthcare facilities are using HL7 today in the U.S. In particular, clinical interface specialists who are responsible for moving clinical data between applications are utilizing HL7 the most. The challenges that most healthcare professionals face with HL7 today are related to the same things that make HL7 great – its flexibility. For instance, the flexibility of HL7 to work in different environments can also make interfacing with unrelated systems difficult.
Every time HL7 is updated, the new versions can also cause some issues. To combat the issue, many organizations have built HL7 interface engines, which provide a silo that routes and translates data between applications. The best of these engines will allow multiple connections to internal and external applications, which allows for the optimal exchange of information. Some have built point-to-point interfaces, but these are difficult to manage with each new evolution of HL7.
OffSite Image Management, Inc. is an industry leader in cloud-based medical image management, from archiving to access – OffSite has solutions that work for providers of all sizes. Furthermore, we know your HL7 structured data also deserves an archiving solution that is flexible and scalable. OffSite has that under control as well. Contact us today and find out how we can assist you with your medical imaging and HL7 needs.