Vendor Cooperation in Marion County, Indiana:

Management and Registry Software Developers Work Together
on HL7 Data Exchange

Late in 2002, QS Technologies was awarded a contract by the Health and Hospital Corporation (HHC) of Marion County, Indiana, to provide its Insight clinic management software to support public health operations in the county, which includes the city of Indianapolis—the 12th largest metropolitan area in the US. Part of that contract included an interface to the Indiana State Immunization registry (CHIRP).

QS met with HHC staff and the CHIRP vendor, Scientific Technologies Corporation (STC) to decide how the interface would work. The Marion County legacy system currently exports immunizations to CHIRP in a proprietary file format once a month. The vendors at the meeting pressed for a real-time two-way interface using HL7. Why would vendors, who could have gotten away with sending a flat file, want to take on the task of building a real-time two-way HL7 interface?

QS Technologies had developed considerable expertise in HL7 through the development of its own immunization registry product, Insight-IR. As an active member of the Committee on Immunization Registry Standards and Electronic Transactions (CIRSET), QS was well aware of interest on the part of state registries to implement real-time interfaces using HL7. QS, along with STC, was an author of the HTTPS HL7 standard, a secure method of transporting HL7 messages. So, comfort with HL7 was an important factor.

As a national clinic management software vendor, QS finds itself in the position of having to write immunization data extract software for many areas of the country. Writing and supporting many “one of a kind” software programs is time consuming and unprofitable (particularly since we don’t charge separately for immunization registry interfaces). The possibility of a single standard interface using HL7 that could be used nationally is appealing, but that standard interface cannot come about without successful implementations (such as in Marion County) to pave the way.

We also felt that a real-time two-way interface would not only provide our customer with improved functionality, but it would provide QS with a “gee whiz” feature to help us in marketing and would give us increased visibility in the immunization registry community. QS has already tested the real-time HL7 interface internally and is scheduled to test with CHIRP registry software in August 2003.

(Source: Kevin Davidson, President of QS Technologies, kdavidson@qstechnologies.com)

July 2003 SnapShots Headlines