Interfacing with Cerner…can it really not escape HL7?

[Mike Strout]

We are implementing the Cerner Millennium LIS in our Epic world and I am wondering if anyone can validate what I heard today from Cerner’s interface analyst…

She said Cerner doesn’t support the escaping of HL7 characters, inbound or outbound. I can verify that this is how it is acting right now as we have a department in Cerner called LTD and I have received result messages that contain strings like… “the quality of the H & E”.

Has anyone worked enough with Cerner to either confirm that it can’t escape HL7 or tell me where I need to tell my Cerner Analyst to look to configure her side?

Topic

[Jim Kosloskey]

Mike,

We are in the process of integrating Millennium Lab and we are sending escaped sequences and also getting escaped sequences.

Now it is entirely possible aliased elements won’t be escaped. We have asked that be looked at post go-live.

email: jim.kosloskey@jim-kosloskey.com 30+ years Cloverleaf, 60 years IT – old fart.

[Anonymous]

This is mostly from uCern:

OE Outbound Interfaces

The ENABLEESCAPES property was intended for outbound comservers or outbound processing from eso when escape sequences need to be put into the messages.

OE Inbound Interfaces

For these to be translated in open engine the ENABLEESIESCAPES property needs to be set on the esi comservers processing the inbound result messages. The ENABLEESIESCAPES should not be set on the inbound and nor should it be set on the esi comserver with this configuration. This is the preferred configuration for all inbound processing.

These properties can be configured using the oen_proc_view ccl utility, or in OpenView > Process Config > Error Recovery Tab.

ESO doesn’t perform escape processing on every field in the message, but it does for most of the ones you would expect.

[Mike Strout]

Thanks David. The OE Inbound interface comments are a bit confusing as they seem to say…”set ENABLEESIESCAPES”, but at then say “ENABLEESIESCAPES should not be set” and that not setting it is the preferred configuration. Sadly, this is what I have come to expect from Cerner. Black is black, unless it is white, but even then it may be still be black…or orange.

What you gave me though should be enough for me to educate my Cerner interface resource on their product.

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