Making Reference Labs More Competitive and Profitable with HL7 Interface Engines
Strengthening and Streamlining the Community of Referring Physicians
Abstract
Why are healthcare reference labs, which are using an HL7 interface engine for electronic data exchange with their clients, more competitive and profitable?
Reference lab managers searching for ways to electronically receive orders and send results to their clients can use this paper to:
- Confirm the interfacing challenge including:
- Paper and electronic workflow
- Reasons for the shift from paper to electronic
- Electronic messaging issues
- Understand an interface engine’s role within a reference laboratory
- Discover the advantages delivered by an interface engine
- Learn the attributes of a quality interface engine
- Realize that NeoTool’s NeoIntegrate is an ideal interface engine solution
The Reference Laboratory Challenge
Finding success in the reference lab market requires more than providing clinical and specialty testing. Increasing revenue requires labs to provide more services to a growing variety of clients. Constantly improving quality while producing, managing, transmitting and archiving test results at lower costs are all requirements for competitive reference labs today.
Physicians and their patients rely on reference labs for the timely and precise communication of test results as the foundation of diagnosis and treatment. It is, therefore, critical to manage the flow of orders and results between a wide variety of clients on a timely basis.
The Reference Laboratory Challenge
Finding success in the reference lab market requires more than providing clinical and specialty testing. Increasing revenue requires labs to provide more services to a growing variety of clients. Constantly improving quality while producing, managing, transmitting and archiving test results at lower costs are all requirements for competitive reference labs today.
Physicians and their patients rely on reference labs for the timely and precise communication of test results as the foundation of diagnosis and treatment. It is, therefore, critical to manage the flow of orders and results between a wide variety of clients on a timely basis.
Effective management is getting more difficult each day. The list of client types and healthcare systems served by reference labs grows daily (see the table below). The quantity and variety of clients greatly increases the complexity of the work flow. Download complete PDF version to see table.
In order to better understand, this paper contrasts the workflow of the paper-based reference lab to one that is electronic. It also outlines the advantages of the electronic system.
Current Workflow
Workflow in the traditional reference lab is designed around receiving specimens along with a paper requisition from clients. This system uses order entry clerks to manually enter requisitions into the Laboratory Information System (LIS) as the specimens are received. After processing the specimens, results are typically delivered to the physicians via fax or some other “paper” based method. This manual order entry is slow and error-prone, inefficient and expensive.
Electronic Workflow
Data movement begins when the client enters an order into the order entry system or into the reference lab’s web portal. Specimens are shipped after the order data is sent electronically via HL7 to the reference lab.
Upon receipt of a specimen, clerks merely scan a barcode on the specimen to lookup previously transmitted order information. This approach significantly reduces the time for processing requisitions and reduces the number of errors due to illegible and improperly entered requisitions.
As soon as a test is complete, results are delivered electronically to the ordering physician. They are communicated via real time links, batch file retrieval or via a secure web site.
A message structured using the HL7 data standard can easily be modified to accommodate the requests of each client. Requests are often minor changes of the message content or vocabulary. For example, mapping from reference lab test local codes into LOINC codes during message preparation is a common task.
In summary, electronic communications provides lower cost, faster delivery of accurate results, and is more easily configured to meet client requests making a reference laboratory more competitive and profitable.
_______________________________________________________________________ To download a complete version of Making Reference Labs More Competitive and Profitable with HL7 Interface Engines, follow the PDF link below.| Attachment | Size |
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| Reference-Lab-Competitive-HL7-Engine.pdf | 121.22 KB |