Maintain outside system details.

We receive incoming HL7 order messages and send HL7 results back to other systems.
Incoming is Radiology study orders, Outgoing is the study report( results ).

We want to be able to send the resulsts back with information from the incoming order.
Our EMR system does not support this.
So I would need to do everything in Iguana.
Can previous messages be retrieved from the log inside the translator ?
or does the incoming messages need to be stored with some other method.

We need to return to the outside system, patient name, patientid, accession number, orderid, order description all exactly as received.

Are there examples or anything I can look at.

This would be a small amount, I am hoping I do not need a SQL server to store records.
Results are usually returned in less than a week.

Thanks for any help / info
Steven

Hi Steven,

Yes you can query the logs from the Translator. Check out this help page.

In the long run, it might be more efficient to store these details in a database. You could see whether a SQLite database can serve your needs. (SQLite is embedded into Iguana.) How many channels would be relying on the database to read and write? About how many orders would need to be stored? The answers might be a starting point for evaluating SQLite as a solution.

Hope that helps.

Casey Trauer,
Director, Client Education
iNTERFACEWARE

I’m with Casey on the use of an external database. I’ve used the Iguana API for fetching messages from the logs, and performance can be … variable. I don’t think it’s an Iguana issue per se, as there are often other things going on in the server environment that can affect performance. Using a web service to fetch an entire message just to scrape out a few data elements can be costly in terms of CPU cycles.

Depending on your tolerance for risk, you could use something as light-weight as an SQLite database for tracking identifiers and other pertinent data from the order messages, subsequently fetching it for the returned result by MRN/account number, placer order number, or other identifier that would be contained in the result. You’ll also need to include logic for handling Cancels and Order Changes (and possibly patient merges?), and clean up the database periodically to age out old/obsolete records.

Jeff Drumm ◊ VP and COO ◊ HICG, LLC. ◊ http://www.hicgrp.com