HL7 - Triggering SIUs to pull information from an EMR

Question

I am looking for a way to pull information from EMRs using HL7. I need to get scheduling information from existing EMRs. All the information I need is inside of SIU messages. However, to my understanding, these are only notifications and provide a feed of new information. I need a way to trigger an SIU-12 for every existing scheduling record in order to pull all scheduling dates/times. Is there a way I can achieve this with HL7?

Thanks!

Answer 1

From my experience, each vendor is going to implement this differently and there will be no consistent way to get all of the existing scheduling messages. Your best bet is to work with each vendor independently and determine the best approach to getting this data. Not every vendor is going to be friendly/helpful here, so expect some mixed responses.

If you are looking to go at it without the help of a vendor, here are a couple of different approaches that I have seen:

1. Set a hard start date where there will be no information prior to go-live. Since HL7 is event based, this is the most commonly supported workflow, as it really does not require any change from the EMR side. The big downside here is that you are going to be missing out on pre-existing information. The upshot is that it should work for every vendor.
2. Have the EMR staff touch or trigger all scheduling from their system. Having this performed will vary depending on the vendor. For some systems, getting that bulk export will be easy and for others it may be a manual process.
3. Pull the data from the vendor's data store and do a bulk import. This is going to probably be the trickiest of the bunch, as each vendor will use a different technology (SQL Server, Cache, etc.), store data differently, and so on.