Has anyone interfaced with PHINMS

[Tony Brewton]

Hi All,

  My hospital is considering an interface to the Department of Public Health.  Initially we were considering a “simple” VPN connection to support the real-time HL7 feed.  However, the vendor is suggesting that we use their product called PHINMS (Public Health Information Nework Messaging System).   My understanding is that this software will reside on a PC or server class machine within my sites network and encrypt messages prior to their being sent across the internet.  

   Has anyone here had experience with establishing an interface between Cloverleaf and PHINMS?  Will this system support a real-time HL7 feed, or will it be necessary to set up a batch file?  Any help or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

   Thanks

Topic

[Aaron Markley]

Tony,

 Our organization has created an ODBC connection to the SQL database of our own implementation of PHINMS.  Results are sent from our lab system in a batch process early every morning, which are processed and routed to this connection.  

Each message sent to the PHINMS database is then sent from PHINMS as a single record, so we have decided to compile messages from certain states into common files, each of which are then passed to PHINMS as individual records (for example, we compile all Massachusetts messages for one day into a single file, which is passed to PHINMS as one record).  Your method may differ based on how you are sending and who you’re sending to.

Let me know if you have other questions.

-Aaron

[frans de Wet]

We (at Florida Department of Health) have done testing with creating messages directly in the outbound PHINMS message queue in the database, and adding all associated required information as part of the insert.  This seems to work fine.  

Inserts can be a bit tricky as the message data is a BLOB type field.

Apart from that you can also just set up Folder Based Polling and place a file with the data in the appropriate folder on the PHINMS server.  The folder you place the file in is already configured with the appropriate settings for transmission.  This is the easiest way to do it.  

Messages can be placed in the outbound queue one at a time, no problem.  I cannot speak for how efficient this is as it takes around 10 to 20 seconds to actually arrive at the destination.  I would say it is probably more efficient to do batching due to the overhead.

Frans

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