Sending RTF Encoded Text in an OBX-5

[Lawrence Staffieri]

Our customer wants us to send them a progress note in RTF format.  The sample they provided shows that the data has the RTF markup in the message. It is passed in the OBX Segment.

Has anyone else done this?

If so, what are the Gotchas?  Is there anything I need to be aware of? or anything special I need to do to make this happen correctly?

Thanks,

Larry Staffieri

Standing Stone Inc.

Topic

[Robert Kersemakers]

Hi Larry,

I never had to send RTF with HL7, but we receive RTF inside an ORU message from another system. One thing to take note of is to escape all HL7 special characters (|, ^, & etc) in the RTF-text. Or else your HL7 message isn’t valid when you include the RTF into OBX-5.

And if images are included in the RTF, then your RTF can get very large.

Zuyderland Medisch Centrum; Heerlen/Sittard; The Netherlands

[Jim Kosloskey]

Lawrence,

One way to do this is to encode the RTF to base-64. Then there is no need to escape the MSH-2 and MSH-3 characters (the receiving system may not handle the escape mechanism) in the report.

The OBX-2 field should also have the correct Data Type (if memory serves I think that is ED) and then the OBX-5 field needs to be formatted correctly and one of the components specifies the encoding technique as base-64.

This is all clearly specified in the HL/7 documentation and should be followed.

email: jim.kosloskey@jim-kosloskey.com 29+ years Cloverleaf, 59 years IT - old fart.

[Lawrence Staffieri]

Thank you for the reply.  We are going to implement the Base-64 encoding.

[Author]

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