I don’t know about “industry norm”, I imagine there would be many factors that might affect how long you keep messages resident on the engine machine. For us, we default to 7 days. Our train of thought is that if a customer/vendor/whomever can’t realize that there’s an issue within a week, there are likely other issues that need to be addressed first, especially in such a time-sensitive industry as healthcare. For our BMDI sites, we only keep 3 days-worth, as those values definitely become stale very quickly, not to mention the sheer volume of messages on that type of interface.
That being said, there are also instances where we go significantly longer, up to 90 days. These are mostly state agencies(immunization recording, HIE’s, etc…). They either have regulations on how long messages need to be saved, and/or they are significantly slower in identifying issues that might require resends.
That that being said, it can also depend somewhat on your main EHR system. We keep messages in our main system for 90 days. So, worst come to worst, we can always go there to find messages, if need be.
HTH,
TIM
Tim Pancost
Trinity Health
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