Analysis and comparison of HL7 messages in a hospital services
Due to the high number of IT systems present in health institutions, their specificity and their usefulness in improving the delivery of health services, creates a serious problem for institutions when there are problems in the integrations between the various IS's. In this article we detail an analysis made to the state of integrations among the IS of two Portuguese hospitals. In both hospitals, the SIs of the clinical analysis and radiology departments and their integrations with the hospital's central IS were analyzed. The integrations use the HL7 standard that is widely used for the communication of data between the various computer systems in health institutions in Portugal. From the HL7 messages exchanged by the analyzed SI, the segments MSH, PID, PV1, OBR, ORC and MSA were observed. Our results allow us to conclude that the quality of integrations in terms of completeness of required and conditional fields is similar in the two hospitals analyzed (90% in A and 91% in B). We conclude that there are significant differences between hospitals regarding the use of HL7 standard, percentage of syntactic and semantic errors.