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Healthcare Interface Monitoring

The ideal HL7 interface should allow you to monitor all of your connections from a central location to ensure messages are delivered successfully. When a connection stops or a message is not delivered, monitoring ensures that this information is immediately available. This allows the interface team to quickly respond and resolve the problems within the healthcare integration environment.

Monitoring capabilities should include the capacity to view your connections, review details, and set alerts to be generated.  Specific connection information should include:

• Connection status (stopped, started, etc.)
• Messages processed
• Messages errored
• Connection idle time
• Connection queue (or, backup of messages within the connection)

Your healthcare integration monitoring should be detailed enough to help you identify trends and help predict problems before they occur. 

Healthcare Interface Alerting 

Alerting of issues is a critical feature of an HL7 interface. When there is a problem with the delivery of a message, the sooner the information is known, the better.

When evaluating an interface it is important to find out how, and how quickly, alerting occurs. The ideal alerting approach includes proactive monitoring and little manual oversight. These features reduce the cost and manpower incurred through manual monitoring of logs, databases or monitors. 

The best HL7 alerting functionality includes:

• Proactive notification of issues
• Configurable settings to specify when an alert will be generated
• Escalation if the situation is not resolved after the configured amount of time
• Ability to view and filter the alerts
• Recording of resolution actions

All of these features work together to assure that healthcare messages are delivered in a timely manner for the effective treatment of patients.

Last 5 posts by Elizabeth Armenta

• Continuity of Care Document for Clinical Data Exchange - July 29th, 2008
• An Overview of CCD Templates - July 23rd, 2008
• What Are LOINC Codes? - December 18th, 2007
• The Essentials of a Good Interface Engine - January 10th, 2007
• The Ideal Healthcare Interface Monitoring and Alerting Approach - December 8th, 2006