HL7 2.6 OBX 23-25 Perfoming Organizatino for Lab

[Bob Schmid]

It seems as though the above fields are now a requirement as of earlier this year and the states/fed are threatening fines if the perfoming department is not displayed on the viewable./printable result.

Question on approach:

HL7 defines fields on the OBX 23-25 in >= HL7 2.6

Our labs and EHR Nurses/lab admins don’t “like” the way it looks in that it stores and displays (in this case EPIC and our various state/non state affiliated  HIE’s  at the test/obx level repeating perfoming org for each test.

They would like it as a footer at th bottom of the entire result.

HEre’s the pitch:

Has anyone argued one way or the other with their respective labs as to staying with the HL7 definition as opposed to homegrown” solutions ?

I am looking into whether the states comform to a certain format in addition to, opposed to or in line with HL7 (OBX 23-25)

Topic

[Sean Farley]

I’ve never heard from the state or government what they prefer.

We have a Mirth engine set up as our HIE server so we can interface lab, rad, and transcriptions to private practices.  Our organization currently has 4 hospitals so the first question that always comes up when we take on one of these projects is, how do we display the resulting facility?  We have about 20 lab result only interfaces set up with physician offices that are outside of our healthcare network.

From what I’ve seen, it’s split down the middle.  Half of them use the dedicated field in the HL7 spec (OBX segment), and half of them prefer the resulting facility to come in a comment (NTE).  I guess it ultimately depends on the EHR you are working with, and what their capabilities are.  I usually just leave it up to the customer, as either solution, OBX or NTE, are fairly easy to accomplish with our setup.

Internally, we use Cerner on the inpatient side, and GE on the outpatient side.  All labs and radiology are resulted out of Cerner and interfaced to GE. Our lab admin and informatics team like the resulting facility to be sent to GE in a comment (NTE) field.  Populating the OBX segment does not make it “obvious enough” as to which facility the result came from in our GE system.

That’s my input 🙂

[Author]

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