HL7 CLIA and Lab Name location

Question

I have had a request by a client to pull in the Lab Name and CLIA information from several different vendors HL7 feeds. Problem is I am unsure what node I should really pull this information from.

I notice one vendor is using ZPS and it appears they have Lab Name and CLIA there. Although I see that others do not use the ZPS. Just curious what would be the appropriate node to pull these from?

I see the headers nodes look really abbreviated with some of my vendors. I need a perfectly readable name like, 'Johnson Hospital'. Any suggestions on the field you all would use to pull the CLIA and Lab Name?

Answer 1

Welcome to the wild world of HL7. This exact scenario is why interface engines are so prevalent and useful for message exchange in the healthcare industry.

Up until, I believe HL7 v2.5.1, there was no standardization around CLIA identifiers. Assuming you are receiving ORU^R01 message, you may want to look at the segment OBX and field 15, which may have producer or lab identifier. The only thing is that there is a very slim chance that they are using HL7 2.5.1 or are implementing the guidelines as intended. There are a lot of reasons for all of this, but the concept here is that you should be prepared to have to do some work here for each and every integration.

For the data, be prepared to exchange or ask for a technical specification from your trading partner. If that is not a possibility or if they do not have one, you should either ask for a sample export of representative messages from their system or if they maybe have a vendor reference. Since the data that you are looking for is not quite as established as something like an address there is a high likelihood that you will have to get this data from different segments and fields from each trading partner. The ZPS segment that you have in your example, is a good reference. Any segment that starts with Z is a custom segment and was created because the vendor or trading partner could not find a good, existing place to store that data, so they made a new segment to store that data themselves.

For the identifiers, what I would recommend is to create a translation or a mapping table for identifiers. So, if you receive JHOSP or JH123 you can translate/map that to 'Johnson Hospital'. Each EMR or hospital system will have their own way to represent different values and there is no guarantee that they will be consistent, so you must be prepared to handle that scenario.