Need Help With Mapping Unknown Chars From Cerner

[Tyler Swartzenburg]

In some recent HL7 messages from Cerner we received some unknown characters, including en-dashes, em-dashes, SPA, and NBSP chars. We are exploring the impact of changing the encoding in Cerner but the impact is significant, as we do a lot of branching to a bunch of endpoints in Cloverleaf.

We’re wondering if anyone has any sort of experience dealing with mapping bad characters, namely coming out of Cerner. A recent call with Infor reps indicated that other orgs using Cloverleaf may also be using Cerner as a source of data, so I wondered if anyone had any character mapping tables handy.

Any advice anyone can provide would be appreciated.

Topic

[Peter Heggie]

We had bad (character) actors.. but from one specific source. A doctor cut and pasted dictation/consult notes from Word into a text reader that sends them as an ORU into Cloverleaf. This included some strange formatting characters that did not convert to ASCII . We tried education, to no effect. We ended up creating a TCL proc that performed string maps. Every few weeks we added more string mapping From and To characters. That was almost two years ago and we still get that input but the TCL catches it and fixes it.

 

Peter Heggie
PeterHeggie@crouse.org

[Author]

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