Driving Healthcare Analytics Forward with HL7

HL7 has historically been the primary format for healthcare communications, yet it is sometimes the most difficult to extract valuable data from.

HL7 Information: What Is It?

The worldwide standard for exchanging healthcare information is called Health Level 7 (HL7). All types of businesses routinely utilise it to transfer sensitive patient data.

HL7 messages are created in response to events, such as an admission, a lab test order, or a prescription administration. These messages consist of conventional sections that describe the platform, patient, visit, and action.

Nearly every communication with a client at the moment of care leaves a digital trail in the form of these messages.

Opportunities and Limitations of Analysing HL7 Information

For many years, HL7 has facilitated communication across different vendors and technology systems of record. Since HL7 messages are sent in real time, they may fill in the blanks left by a vendor's reporting solution and provide users greater control over when and how they access and use data.

As we've seen, these messages have a wealth of information that's both relevant and useful in a therapeutic situation, and they're simply waiting to be mined, analysed, or combined with other datasets.

An HL7 communication is a "semi-structured" data piece. This implies that the segments and fields being sent have unique markers indicating them, allowing the receiving system to interpret them correctly, but making them difficult to convert into a table in a column/row data warehouse.

In the past, HL7 work was done with the help of ETL tools, which required extensive time and money to licence and maintain. Unfortunately, this method prevents many analytics efforts from accessing and using this data.

Why HL7 Compliant Important for Healthcare Organisation ?

These days, electronic health records and electronic medical records are all anybody can think about.

Even if these systems were perfect in every way, they wouldn't be useful unless there was some way for them to talk to the other software and hardware already in use in the medical field. HL7 serves this purpose.

Among the many contributors to these developments in healthcare interoperability, HL7 stands out as particularly crucial.

In the context of the internet, EMRs, HISs, RISs, and all of the other systems can be thought of as websites. They are quite potent, and many people are trying to make the best possible tools for them.

But much like the internet itself, these resources are of little value unless people have a way to access and utilise them.

What occurs in the background to make it possible for healthcare systems to interact and exchange data is called HL7.

What advantages does HL7 offer?

The HL7 standards help to unite cutting-edge IT with current healthcare delivery.

Modern longitudinal patient records that are compliant with HL7 standards may incorporate more settings and services.

As the healthcare industry moves toward using new data kinds and technologies, the rules have been changing to stay current and define the rules to accommodate growing use cases. From older, more document- and message-based approaches to the newest application programming interfaces.

Maximise the utility of EHRs:

Electronic health records (EHRs) and interoperability are two of healthcare IT's most talked-about subjects. Radiology, laboratory, and patient administration systems are just a few examples of the many software packages used on a daily basis by the healthcare industry.

Interoperability and the exchange of data across EHRs are essential if their full potential is to be realised. The issue develops when it is difficult to establish communication between the many programmes and apps. When two or more healthcare professionals need to exchange data, the situation becomes more complicated.

Interoperability amongst EHR systems is essential for achieving maximum ROI. When systems provide data in a proprietary format that makes logic only to them, gaining access to data created elsewhere might be difficult, if not impossible.

To facilitate the storage and exchange of data between software manufacturers and healthcare providers, HL7 offers essential rules. As a result, the administrative load is lessened and the quality of treatment provided is increased since data can be readily linked across systems, presented in a unified way, and understood in its totality by healthcare professionals and personnel.

Reducing inefficiencies and maximising clinical productivity:

Throughout their lives, patients will likely have several interactions with healthcare professionals. Visiting a general practitioner (GP) could lead to further care from other professionals, such as a physiotherapist, pharmacist, lab testing, and even hospitalisation.

Patients can be expected to maintain their whole medical history with them at all times. In order to offer the best treatment possible for their patients, healthcare practitioners may benefit from the increased access to data made possible by standards like HL7.

Conclusion

In conclusion, HL7 has been shown to be the future standard, with almost every healthcare IT infrastructure now adopting it. One such company is SISGAIN, which offers healthcare cloud services built on HL7 infrastructure. In order to facilitate the most sophisticated advantages of this standard in all of the operations and data transmission, the Salesforce-based EMR that allows for the quickest customization uses HL7 and FHIR as its basic data architecture.