Lawson to Epic materials management

It has been a looong time since I have dealt with Lawson Products but they used to be able to provide X12 and some HL/7 but you needed to find the right person to talk to.

As I recall the field people were not very knowledgeable about anything but the proprietary structures.

So perhaps you need to be persistent to make sure you exhaust all potentials.

HealthPartners is using an interface from Lawson to Epic for for Materials Management items.  It is HL7 format, but almost everything comes from Lawson in Z-segments.  We receive batch from Lawson and send real-time to Epic.

I have a Lawson material management charge file going through cloverleaf that I send to SMS which I did on 5/24/2001.

I got the impression we were one of the first HL7 interfaces and that might be part of why they seemed like a dear in the headlights to work with.

God help you if they haven’t grown their understanding in the last decade but 11 years should of given them time to improve.

At that time the person I had to work with did not know anything and I had to guide him through getting this interface done.

This person was by far the least experienced I’ve ever worked with like a newbie out of high school would be.

He had never even heard of the word HL7 and couldn’t understand why a simple question like what version of HL7 will the file be in was relevant.

When I heard Lawson bought HealthVison I said to myself that is an addition to knowledge they can use and it would be good for Lawson but does raise a concer will it be good for Cloverleaf.

Lawson already has Healthvision off to a shakey start with how to figure out how to navigate the support barrier which has us without any support right now but we are getting their.

Personally I want to have a phone number like before I call and get a person immediately, anything less than that is not support in my book.

Our system admins that have been at other hospitals also set my expectations as low as possible in a meeting last week about the Lawson support being one of the worst based on their experiences.

Fortunately, between myself and Jim Kosloskey we probably give more support than we get but during Cloverleaf upgrades there are support questions that need to be answered sometimes.

Now back to our Lawson integration for material management charges.

The HL7 charge file I get from Lawson for materials management is fairly typical HL7 2.1 layout and has no Z segments in it.

the file layout has one segment on each line as follows:

MSH

EVN

PID

PV1

FT1

the file has the following header segment at the beginning of the file on its own line

BHS

the file has the following trailer segment on the last line of the file

BTS

This is a fairly typical chage file layout which we have several simialr to this and we use our standard batch processing model to prep the layout for the cloverleaf translate to a FRL for SMS by converting the invidual segments into a single MSH message one per line like the xlate likes it.

I don’t have any visibility on the Lawson side to give you any particualr interface discriptor they might be calling their interface but your Lawson contact might be able to reference their MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX account to obtaing any specifics if you ask them to.

I looked at the archived HL7 message and looks like it is HL7 2.2 now.

We, at CDH, are in the throws of developing this interface. We have custom extracts that pull info from Lawon and we convert to HL7. That part is pretty easy. Here’s the ard part:

We are an alopha site for their new contract mgmt module and have been doing Just in time ordering. Our MatMan team is not keen to creating Lawson IDs which track the items across time. Epic needs a unique identifier for the items. If there is no Lawson ID, we need to create a unique identifier using the Manufacturer code and catelog number (MFC). Catelog number by itself is not unique. This can cause extra duplicates in the SUP file and cause lots of grief for Optime team. Since Lawson IDs can be added to an item at a later date, this may cause an additional duplicate of that Item if using the Lawson ID as the primary identifier.

To handle this, we created a x-ref file for the MFC to see if it was already added to SUP without a Lawson ID. If that item then comes across and is in the x-ref file, we use the MFC as primary code and then add the lawosn ID as a seoncdary.

If your site will have Lawson IDs for every item, then you have nothing to worry about. If you can have items without a Lawosn ID, there’s much to think about.

Good luck to you.

We are trying to do the same thing with going from Lawson Materials Mgmt to Epic but are having a tough time.  The file we receive is IC527WK and when we use transaltion or tcl it does one of two things…it either reads each segment as its own message or it reads all the segments as the MSH…the file we receive from Laswon is in the following format:

MSH

MFI

CD1

CD2

CD3

I hope you have better luck than we are…lol

Patrick:

I have a good bit of experience with converting various batch files into a useable format for the Cloverleaf translation.

The one segment per line layout that is a challenge for you is fairly common.

Our preprocessing phase of our batch model is where we take care of things like this before the file goes to xlate.

There are several ways to accomplish the desired outcome that I’m willing to discuss with you off-line if you are able to catch me by phone.

Otherwise, there are posts on clovertech that repeatedly talk about this sort of thing but the clovertech search function is minimal and might make it hard to locate those posts.

Patrick:

I did a clovertech search and locate one post that you might find helpful with reformating one segment per line to be one message per line.

    <a href="https://usspvlclovertch2.infor.com/viewtopic.php?t=2888&#8243; class=”bbcode_url”>https://usspvlclovertch2.infor.com/viewtopic.php?t=2888

This will at least give you one tangible approach.

Patrick,

Epic provided me with a Lawson527toEpic word document.

Kirby, I think you might just be my favoritest person in the world today. 😉

J.

Hi Kirby/Jennifer

I