HL7 Interface

CareWatch^® and RiskWatch^® – (January 2011)

We have added an HL7 interface to CareWatch and RiskWatch that will make life easier for you.  It allows you to send us ADT (Admission, Discharge, Transfer) records.  This new feature provides the following advantages: 

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  • New admissions (ADT-A01 admission message type) will be registered in the system and added to the Assessments Due schedule in CareWatch.  Also, new residents will become available for incident reporting in RiskWatch.
    
  • Discharges (ADT-A03 discharge message type) will likewise be registered in CareWatch and the Assessments Due schedule will notify you when a discharge assessment is needed.
    
  • Resident status changes are reflected in CareWatch and RiskWatch within minutes of submission.

1.  Identify the customer implementation contact information.  The flexibility of the HL7 messaging standard means that each implementation will require some refinement.  

   1. Identify the customer contact once HL7 processing is established.  eHDS monitors message traffic to identify disruptions in message traffic.  If we have not received a message in the past 24 hours, our support staff will need to know who should be contacted (regular business hours only).   

   2. Define the translation maps for facility identifiers, rooms and units.  The customer implementation contact, in conjunction with the eHDS support team, will define the identifier maps between the customer’s system and the eHDS system.   

   3. Create a secure FTP drop site to receive messages.  eHDS uses a secure file transfer to receive files containing one or more HL7 messages.  This task is done by the eHDS support team.   

   4. Construct HL7 files and create the transmission mechanism.  The customer must create the HL7 files (one or more per document) and create a mechanism to send those files to our secure site on a defined schedule.  The files must be simple text documents (not zip files) and must have the file extension .hl7.   

   5. Create a message channel to read the HL7 files.  eHDS support staff will create an HL7 message channel which will read the files from the secure FTP folder and process the messages into CareWatch and RiskWatch.   

   If your organization would like to set up an HL7 feed, please call our customer support line at 888.562.8906 or your organization’s designated support number and we will be happy to help you get started.

   Notes:

     ~ The eHDS implementation of HL7 supports only Admissions (ADT-A01) and Discharges (ADT-A03) at this time. Support for any additional message formats will require system enhancement.

    
   ~ The eHDS implementation does not provide message acknowledgments.