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What Is Your Healthcare Interface Method

Gain Leverage in Your Clinical Interface Environment

Hospitals, imaging centers, laboratories, 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), Hospital Information System (HIS), Radiology Information System (RIS), Laboratory Information System (LIS), 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

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.

Interfacing Approaches

There are two interfacing approaches for healthcare providers to pursue: point-to-point or interface engine. This section will outline briefly the concept behind each with the advantages and disadvantages highlighted.
see advantages and disadvanteges in full PDF report

Point-to-Point Approach

A point-to-point interface is one in which the receiving vendor provides a specification on what data it can receive and in what format it needs to be in. The sending application then builds an interface to that specification for that application. It is a one-to-one relationship. For each application requiring an interface, there is a new request and point-to- point interface developed.

Interface Engine Approach

An interface engine can transform or map the data to the receiving application’s requirements while the message is in transit so that it can be accepted by the receiving application.

Essentially, the import and export module from the sending application is built in a very comprehensive manner, capturing all potential data to be used in one interface.

The application interface is built with a one-to-many concept in mind. These import/export modules then are connected to an interface engine so that the mapping, routing, and monitoring are managed by this system.

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To download a complete version of What Is Your Healthcare Interface Method, follow the PDF link below.