A Document Interface

One of our trading partners is sending us clinical documents from their EHR system. These are plain text documents. The documents are being sent in HL7 v2.3 ORU^R01 messages.

They are sending us the document in a single OBX segment with line breaks in the OBX-5 field. I have seen other systems send each line in a separate OBX segment. I call that the "card punch" format, because each line of the report is on its own data card, just like the old days.

This is what one of the messages looks like:

MSH|^~\\&|DOC|K|DOC|WSUPG1|20110328082244||ORU^R01|Q1484927743T1489224997||2.3|||AL
PID|1|...
PV1|1|CD:123456||CD:9999|||0000000000^SMITH^ZACHARY|||...
ORC|RE||...
OBR|1||999999999|PROGN^Progress Note^^^xxx SICU Progress Note|||...
OBX|1|TX|PROGN^Progress Note||...NOTE GOES HERE~New Line~Another New Line||||||F|||20110328082242||

They are sending us the following document types (the left value is the code that I recieve, and the right side is the corresponding LOINC code):

DISCH^Discharge Summary ==> code="18842-5" displayName="DISCHARGE SUMMARIZATION NOTE"
PROGN^Progress Note ==> code="11506-3" displayName="Subsequent evaluation note"
HP^History and Physical ==> code="34117-2" displayName="History and Physical Note"
CONS^Consultation ==> code="11488-4" displayName="CONSULTATION NOTE"
OPRPT^Operative Report ==> code="11504-8" displayName="Surgical operation note"
ADMN^Admission Note ==> code="34862-9" displayName="Admission Evaluation Note"

The document type code appears in the OBR-4 field and the OBX-3 field. The project manager has me filtering out the H&P documents because they are not in scope for the first phase of the project. I added a filter to discard the H&P documents, and I will get to remove that later.

The only other interesting thing is that I have to look up the National Provider Identifier (NPI) for the providers in the PV1 segment. The remote system is sending us their provider ID, and we need the NPI to match on. So, I have a database look-up that retrieves the NPI and places that in the message. I am performing the look-up on the PV1-7 Attending Doctor, PV1-8 Referring Doctor and the PV1-9 Consulting Doctor fields. I then take whichever of these three fields has an NPI (and is therefore, one of our doctors) and place that value into PV1-7.

NextGen will match on PV1-7 and will place the document into the doctor's PAQ (Provider Approval Queue). The document was already signed by a doctor at the sending facility (unless it is a Progress Note, in which case it may be signed by a non-doctor), so our Doctor's are not really "approving" the document. This is just a way to ensure that our doctor's see the document.

NextGen will also add the document to the appropriate patient's chart.

We are doing some final testing on this interface before moving it into production.