Health Level Seven Generic Web Interface

Data transmission between two or more computers in such a way that they can process it without human intervention, requires defining proper standards and protocols. HTTP, TCP/IP, etc. are examples of such protocols, but they deal in more generic communication channels. While sending domain-specific data requires definition of more specific standards. HL7 (Health Level Seven) is one of the EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) standards mainly used to exchange the data between healthcare service providers (Billing Companies, Hospitals, clinics, nursing homes etc.) and laboratories/pharmacies to send and receive patient's medical record (PMR). Although the standard for HL7 is there, but because of huge range of medical tests and lack of supervisory authority to insure all labs and healthcare providers are following the standards to full extent, there are incompatibility issues. There are hundreds of variations in implementation of HL7 used by labs and healthcare providers. For big healthcare service provider dealing with thousands of labs and doctor offices; it requires a large team to manage HL7 communication and compatibility between multiple labs and doctor offices. HL7 Generic Web Interface (HL7GWI) has been designed to provide a user interface for healthcare service providers to design HL7 interfaces dynamically to reduce the human resource burden on the company in an efficient and manageable way. The basic purpose of the system is to perform interoperability among various domains such as laboratory, patient registration, pharmacy, billing and scheduling etc. HL7GWI is developed as an integration module to meet the dynamic needs of healthcare industry. After execution of some scripts (Database Tables/SP's) at their end they will be able to handle all the issues at their own end. A case study is presented to demonstrate the functionality and evaluation of the proposal.