HL7 is a standard for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information between healthcare providers, patients, and other stakeholders in the healthcare industry. While an HL7 bridge has many advantages for exchanging health information, it may not be the best option for downloading changes to a doctor’s appointment calendar for the following reasons:
- Complexity: HL7 is a complex standard with many options and features, and implementing it can be challenging. It may not be the best option for simple use cases such as downloading changes to a doctor’s appointment calendar.
- Overhead: HL7 is designed to support complex workflows and multiple systems exchanging health information. It has a lot of overhead, including message headers, message footers, and other metadata that may not be necessary for downloading changes to a doctor’s appointment calendar.
- Latency: HL7 messages can be large, and exchanging them can take time. Downloading changes to a doctor’s appointment calendar requires low latency and high availability to ensure that the calendar is always up-to-date.
- Security: HL7 messages may contain sensitive patient information, and securing them can be challenging. Downloading changes to a doctor’s appointment calendar may not require the same level of security, and other simpler options may be available.
- Cost: The initial and ongoing costs associated with building the software and infrastructure to enable healthcare interoperability HL7 internally can be substantial.
- Time To Market: Building healthcare integrations can be time-consuming and can shift your organization’s focus from innovating to integrating.
- Reliability: DoctorConnect’s integration tools have proven to be more reliable and fault tolerant than changes relayed over an HL7 bridge. DoctorConnect has been a pioneer in the development of reliable, secure integration tools for over 15 years
- Support: Since we don’t depend on a new technology layer – DoctorConnect is able to quickly make changes to meet your clinics changing needs and goals. We are able to quickly diagnose and correct any issues that may arise to keep your operation running seamlessly.
Therefore, while HL7 has many advantages for exchanging health information, it may not be the best option for integrating with a patient engagement service. DoctorConnect strongly suggests using simpler, more reliable options such as using a FIHR API, a vendor API, automated macros or a simple database queries to achieve your patient engagement goals. These methods are low-overhead, low-maintenance, and highly reliable ways to interface with your EMR.
Contact us today to discuss your options and schedule a quick demo of our tools.
