1.0 What is HL7?
Health Level Seven is one of several ANSI-accredited Standards
Developing Organizations (SDOs) operating in the healthcare
arena. Most SDOs produce standards (sometimes called specifications
or protocols) for a particular healthcare domain such as
pharmacy, medical devices, imaging or insurance (claims
processing) transactions. Health Level Sevens domain
is clinical and administrative data. Their mission is to:
"To provide standards for the exchange, management
and integration of data that support clinical patient care
and the management, delivery and evaluation of healthcare
services. Specifically, to create flexible, cost effective
approaches, standards, guidelines, methodologies, and related
services for interoperability between healthcare information
systems." http://www.hl7.org
Important Notice:
The following HL7 tutorial required LINKMED®
IE software.
1.1 HL7 Interface Overview
In health care, a trigger event is a real-world
event that creates a need for data to flow among systems.
A trigger event, for example, can be admitting, transferring,
or discharging a patient. This document demonstrates how
triggered events can be put into message format and delivered
to other vendor systems.
This web page tutorial has message formats
that consist of data fields that are of variable length
and separated by a field separator character. Rules describe
how the various data types are encoded within a field and
when an individual field may be repeated. The data fields
are combined into logical groupings called segments. Each
segment begins with a three-character literal value that
identifies it within a message. Segments may be defined
as required or optional and may be permitted to repeat.
Individual data fields are found in the message by their
position within their associated segments.
2.0 Message Transactions
A message is a unit of data transferred between
systems. It is comprised of a group of segments in a defined
sequence. Each message has a message type that defines its
purpose. For example, the ADT (Admission, Discharge and
Transfer) message type is used to transmit portions of a
patient's ADT data from one system to another. The three-character
code contained within each message identifies its type (ADT,
ORM, ORU).
Example of HL7 ADT Message:
MSH|^~\&|RIS|WB0|LINKMED|CARD|200307070841||ADT^A01|1|P|2.3|AL|NE|
Example of HL7 ORDER (ORM) Message:
MSH|^~\&|RIS|WB0|LINKMED|CARD|200307070841||ORM^O01|2|P|2.3|AL|NE|
Example of HL7 Unsolicited Result (ORU) Message :
MSH|^~\&|RIS|WB0|LINKMED|CARD|200307070841||ORU^R01|3|P|2.3|AL|NE|
Example of HL7 Medical Documentation
Management (MDM) Message:
MSH|^~\&|RIS|WB0|LINKMED|CARD|200307070841||MDM^T02|3|P|2.3|AL|NE|
Example of HL7 Billing (DFT-Detail Finacial
Transaction) Message:
MSH|^~\&|RIS|WB0|LINKMED|CARD|200307070841||DFT^P03|3|P|2.3|AL|NE|