Passing Data Between Organizations 1

[LonnieJohnson]

I work for an company that does child placing for our State. We have a system we have built using ASP.net (VS2010) and SQL Server 2012. With the Health Information Exchange gaining momentum we wanted to know if it is hard to build a process to exchange information with other organizations.

How hard is it to connect systems between organizations? Has anyone has to do that yet?

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[philhege]

Depends on what you mean by "hard". If you have tech-savvy, engaged staff at both ends of the pipe, it's not hard, just a lot of work.

There are many ways to skin this cat, depending on organizational preferences/policies. Think about the possibilities: you could send a file via FTP; auto-post to a Web form; use a published Web service; replicate to a remote database. The list goes on.

There are many standards and protocols out there, depending on the domain. Take a look at EDI X12 documentation for example.

So long as you agree on:
Data Standards
Naming Conventions
File/Dataset formats
Transports
Security
Scheduling
Exception processing
Support
Future directions

you're good to go.

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With business clients like mine, you'd be better off herding cats.

 

[LonnieJohnson]

Thanks philhege for the quick response.

That all makes sense. I guess I kind of got caught up in the buzz-word-ness of the concept. People are spitting the phrases "interoperability...information exchange..." and such. I know some companies have been designing EHRs and EHRs that have this built in capability. I currently have web services, VPNs and FTPs in place with multiple organizations. Just wanted to know how much momentum this was taking on and if there were any standards or add-ons being developed to level the playing field.

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[LonnieJohnson]

I may be asking more than you care to answer here but do you know why most organizations that pass health information prefer to use HL7? No one has been able to give me a good answer. I am not finding many tools that allow a good transformation to this format from SQL Server.

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[kray4660]

I worked with the HL7 format years ago. It was understood at that time that basically had to write your own custom generator since it depended a lot on what data you were wanting to share. At the time I was working with, there was a rather large manual that described what went where and how to format it. It could be rather overwhelming.

 

[LonnieJohnson]

That is what I am still seeing kray4660. However, I have not dove deep into it but from what I have seen it is cumbersome and clunky.

ProDev, Builders of Affordable Software Applications
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[Auguy]

Hopefully you already know, but you'd better check the HIPPA regs, they are extremely restrictive as to what information you can send and in what form you can send it, encryption, etc.

Auguy
Sylvania/Toledo Ohio