The HL7 Delimiter Characters shown in the table below lists the default delimiter characters that are normally used in HL7 messages. An HL7 message can choose to employ HL7 delimiter redefinitions. If the standard characters are not convenient to use, the HL7 message can use different delimiter characters. In any HL7 message, the delimiter characters used by the message...
“The only thing constant in life is change.” – Francoise de la Rochefoucauld 1613 – 1680 Traditionally, upgrading or replacing an interface engine employs the “Test, Switch, Pray” methodology. This means running the new interface engine through a battery of tests to attempt to cover all of the possible use and test cases it may encounter in production. In...
Each segment of an HL7 message consists of one or more composites (also known as fields). By default, the | (pipe) character is used to separate one composite from another. A composite can be a primitive data type (such as a character string or a number), or can contain other composites. If a composite contains other composites, these sub-composites...
An important part of the HL7 standard is the ACKnowledgment protocol. Every time an application accepts a message and consumes the message data, it is expected to send an ACKnowledgment message back to the sending application. The sending application is expected to keep on sending a message until it has received an ACK message. If you do not follow...
Disasters are inevitable, unpredictable, and they vary in types and seriousness. For example, water leaking into a server room is annoying, but an 8.0 earthquake collapsing the building where the servers are housed is catastrophic. Most enterprise-level organizations have disaster recovery plans for their different business units to minimize disruption to their operations because not doing so...
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When it comes to thinking about your organization’s backup plan for when your systems and applications go down, there are three terms that you are likely to hear a lot: disaster recovery, high availability, and fault tolerance. While these terms are related to one another, it is worthwhile to know the differences between them and understand the role that...
An integration engine (and seriously, let’s stop calling it an interface engine, it does so much more) is an essential piece of healthcare’s technology infrastructure. Today, during this unprecedented global pandemic we need a highly reliable solution to integrate our data seamlessly. For hospitals, an integration engine is responsible for normalizing data and ushering information between all of...
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The universal health data application programming interfaces called for in the 21st Century Cures Act present an opportunity to create the learning healthcare system that has been long envisioned. A learning healthcare system must be able to do more than conduct individual queries on one patient; it requires the ability to aggregate and analyze data … Continue reading "New...
Activities such as managing population health, delivering value-based care, and conducting discovery science require access to large population data sets. The existing FHIR and SMART APIs work well for accessing small amounts of data, but large exports perform poorly, requiring an impractical number of API requests to be issued serially. By adding asynchronous primitives to … Continue reading "Push...
