Description of Session
The use of technology has the ability to improve the quality and efficiency of health care by rapidly providing health care providers with the information they need to effectively manage their patients. One crucial source of information for health providers is laboratory results. As more low- and middle-income countries adopt digital technology for their medical records systems, laboratory information is often left behind. The common practice is that laboratory requests are printed and mailed to the lab and then lab results are entered in the medical records system when they are mailed back to the clinic, which results in a significant lag. Automatic data exchange between the electronic medical record (EMR) system and the laboratory information system (LIS) can enable the timely submission of lab results. When two systems do not use the same data standard for the content of their data, a middleware is needed to translate the data that are exchanged between the two systems, so that the systems can accurately interpret the data. Health Level 7 (HL7) is a common messaging standard used in health care settings. Some health information system applications can generate HL7 messages while others do not yet have this capability. The presenters in this session will demonstrate a use-case for how the NextGen Connect integration engine can serve as the middleware to exchange data between an HL7-enabled LIS and an EMR system that uses a relational database to store its patient-level data. NextGen Connect is an open-source integration engine that can be customized using transaction-based channels. The prototype that will be demonstrated can be adapted to suit the context where it is implemented.
