Streamlining Healthcare Interfaces
Gain Leverage in Your Laboratory Interfacing Environment
Laboratories, hospitals, imaging centers, and clinics are all faced with the demand of providing electronic interfaces at unprecedented rates. The rising demand is due to the operational objective of streamlining workflow and the revenue objective of efficiently establishing productive relationships with referring physicians.
Interfacing applications is an essential ingredient to achieving both objectives. Today, there are two primary approaches to interfacing:
- Create point-to-point interfaces with different application vendors to connect to internal applications or providers and their applications
- Select an interface engine solution that can broker communication of patient data between various internal applications and providers and their applications
Examples of the types of applications requiring interfaces include Electronic Medical Record (EMR), Laboratory Information System (LIS), Hospital Information System (HIS), Radiology Information System (RIS), Dietary, PACS, Emergency Department, transcription, and many others.
Providers requiring interfaces depend on an organized workflow to do their jobs effectively and also depend on delivering accurate, timely results to the referring community. With more and more clinics and physicians at the center of most clinical connection requirements, it is increasingly important to have a foundation on which to easily exchange information.
Determining the most effective approach for healthcare integration has a long term impact on an organization’s physician outreach programs, workflow efficiencies, operational costs, and overall client support
Healthcare Interfacing Overview
To facilitate communication between two healthcare applications, a modest interface includes:
- An export endpoint for the sending application
- An import endpoint for the receiving application
- A method of moving data between the two endpoints
- A method for handling the queuing messages
- A method for logging the flow of messages
Illustrated below is a simple, sample interface between a laboratory’s LIS and a clinic’s EMR. The blue box represents the export endpoint for the LIS and the yellow box represents the import endpoint for the EMR.
See diagram in compete PDF report.
HL7 is the most widely used standard to facilitate the communication between two or more clinical applications. The prime benefit of HL7 is that it simplifies the implementation of interfaces and reduces the need for custom interfaces.
Since it’s inception in the late 1980’s, HL7 has evolved as a very flexible standard with a documented framework for negotiation between applications. The inherent flexibility defined in the HL7 Standard will make the use of an integration technology solution attractive and, most times, a necessity.
Taking this example a step further, illustrated below is the same LIS and EMR systems but with the added capability in both applications to import and export data.
Logic tells us that each healthcare application must grant access to accept and send patient data and have rules of what it will accept and what it will send.
Frequently, the access grant will be hard-and-fast rules rather than flexible ones that provide easy methods for exchanging data. This access to data is usually tightly controlled by each application vendor to ensure data integrity within their application.
Both of these examples are simple: one application exchanging data with another. However, the world of healthcare is not that simple. There are multiple applications and multiple providers in a healthcare organization and community. Each additional application and provider added to the network increases the interfacing complexity exponentially.
The complexity increases due to the hard-and-fast rules about how each application and provider will send and receive data. One “blue box” export interface will not meet the requirements of every application. Similarly, one “yellow box” import interface will not meet the requirements of every application.
_______________________________________________________________________ To download a complete version of Streamlining Healthcare Interfaces, follow the PDF link below.| Attachment | Size |
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| Streamlining-Healthcare-Interfacing-Laboratory.pdf | 154.5 KB |