HL7 Interface

Extracting Locations (Room, Bed, Nursing Station)

The location fields are derived from the HL7 patient location field, which has a total length of 12 characters.  The Smart Suite HL7 separates the HL7 patient location fields in the Smart Suite patient directory.

Extracting Address Fields

Address fields are derived from the HL7 address field, which has a total length of 106 characters. The length of the patient address is 106 by HL7 standard and can be changed to accommodate patient addresses that are greater than 106. We separate the HL7 address field into 8 fields in the Smart Suite patient directory.

Required Database Fields

The standard Smart Suite Patient Directory requires both patient id and visit suffix. The composite key of both fields is a primary key. This key allows maintaining multiple records per patient.

Required HL7 Fields

Smart Suite's standard HL7 configuration files (hl7MsgRules, hl7SegRules, etc) require the following fields.

   MSH field 1 - Field separator
   MSH field 2 - Encoding characters
   MSH field 10 - Message control ID
   MSH field 11 - Processing ID
   MSH field 12 - Version ID
   PID field 3 - Patient ID (Internal ID)
   PID field 5 - Patient Name
   PV1 field 2 - Patient Class
   EVN field 1 - Event Type Code

Even if the above fields are set to be required, the requirement can be changed to optional upon request or during testing phase. In the case of of an A18 (merge), for example, the MRG field is required. The various segments can be set to required or optional on a per-transaction-type basis.

HL7 Messages

The standard configuration of the Smart Suite system will processes the following ADT message events. Events that are not listed below can be processed, but will require a custom configuration, which may include new message rules, segment rules and SQL statements. Conversely, if you send other events that are not configured, they will be ignored.

For the above events, the expected segments are MSH, EVN, PID, and PV1, with PV2 being optional. User-defined segments follow the HL7 standard and need to begin with character Z. Merge message requires MRG segment.
 

HL7 Acknowledgements

The Smart Suite HL7 interface responds to each message following the HL7 acknowledgment rules. The acknowledgement message includes the segments MSH, MSA, and optionally ERR.

Acknowledgment codes are:

Purging Patient Records

In order to minimize the number of records in the patient table, the Smart Suite archival program purges patient records every night. The purge uses standard or configured rules to select the records that are no longer needed. Once matching records are found, the process removes the records from the patient table.

The Smart Suite Standard Rules to purge patient records include:

- Patients discharged three days ago.
- Patients with no admission date.
- Patients that have patient_class of E (typically Emergency visits) and were admitted three days ago.
- Patients that have patient_class of O (typically Outpatient visits) and were admitted three days ago.

While the above rules are simply the standard rules in Smart Suite to purge patient records, the following options remain available:

Adding new rules.
Modifying the existing rules.
Replacing the rules by other rules.

For example, some sites choose to remove the patient data based on the patient_type field rather than the patient_class field. Some have special criteria for pre-admits; some may want the records removed that night if they were discharged; some may want to remove the records from the Smart Suite patient table entirely by facility nightly (as their operators have no need to see those specific patients); some may use a patient_class of O for observation rather than outpatient, and so those would not be desired to be removed three days after admission.