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When two or more people communicate and express ideas, use languages, since they count with rules, structure, and times that allow users to be understood. Within the Healthcare industry, we can find the HL7 standard: an international protocol used as an “electronic language” which facilitates the interested parties to send and receive medical information simply and following established criteria.
Health Level Seven International (HL7) is a non-profit organization, founded in 1987, that develops standards for the exchange, integrations, and electronic retrieval of health sector information, supporting clinical practice and streamlining the management of these services. The organization’s mission is to enhance the interoperability of health data on a global scale.
HL7 counts with over 1,600 members in more than 50 countries, highlighting healthcare providers, governmental organizations, pharmaceutical companies, and consulting firms.
HL7 protocol adoption for a hospital will allow the created and collected information by a Hospital Information System (HIS) to interrelate efficiently and in a single exhibition with other systems, for example, collaborators on RIS and LIS departments, covering whether they are part of the same health center, hospital group or are external to the institute.
Benefits for a hospital after adopting HL7
- When a hospital uses a recognized information protocol to link its HIS, laboratory equipment, and X-ray equipment.
- Resources are optimized the patient information is only recorded once.
- Patient safety increases, because of the reduction of risk originated by a miscommunication.
- Communication is unified, mistakes are avoided, charges are more clear, and recapturing is eliminated.
- The results are sent and clarify the interpretation
What if a hospital is not prepared to implement the HL7 protocol?
Hospitals sometimes operate using a made-to-measure and adapted software. Although this is not an isolated practice, the health center might face some troubles, being system obsolescence one of the biggest.
Just as computer systems add functionalities and reinforce safety through updates, so do laboratory and medical equipment refine their functions. A hospital that does not refresh its processes or system increasingly faces incompatibility between an obsolete system and the innovations of laboratories and imagenology departments.
As a solution to update the medical center system and streamline communication with the LIS and RIS systems, the cloud-based software, Cirrus, has developed Smart Connector: an engine that generates messages in HL7 protocol and sends them to LIS and RIS departments, optimizing the creation of new messages.
Smart Connector was born thanks to the collection of the lessons Cirrus gathered after having already worked with most of the LIS and RIS equipment suppliers, speeding up the hospital operations, mitigating the mistakes, and preparing the infrastructure for upcoming updates.
Through integrations with the HL7 protocol, Cirrus achieves that the imaging and laboratory departments can be displayed in the same software. So, the doctors do not have to use more than one program for patient care.
Centralizing all clinical data will optimize analysis time for medical cases, and it will help teams to share information instantly and clearly. The centralization of these data in a single program is essential for the easy adaptation of new members of the medical area. This Cirrus feature will make the medical crew have more intuitive and quicker training. At the same time, it boosts the organizational speed when generating a diagnostic, a process in which speed can be translated into well-being and patient safety.
