An End-to-End Integration Demo

[Former Member]

Hello everybody,

Long time no see!

Remember in my previous blogs I have mentioned IHE (Integreating Healthcare Enterprises), PI, HL7 messages and SAP Patient Management Enterprise Services?

I am very happy that NOW I can show you a real End-to-End Demo including all the above products and standards!

Before you go follow my blog here is one information: this blog belongs to a blog series about SAP Patient Management Enterprise Services EhP4 from Healthcare Solution Management colleagues. You may have already read their blogs. If not, please read the "How SAP's services support IHE" from Bettina Lieske How SAP's services support IHE; and 2008 year-end shipment from Claudius Metze Engineering a Business Process Platform for Healthcare Part 7 - the 2008 Year-end shipment. 

In this blog I will show you:

• A typical IHE Patient Administration Management (PAM) use case
• The role of SAP Patient Management in the above use case
• SAP Patient Management Enterprise Services vs. HL7 messages
• A Demo to show the whole End-to-End scenario

A typical IHE Patient Administration Management (PAM) use case

The background information about IHE is mentioned in my previous blog: Understanding Standards.

IHE describes the use case as follows: 

"A Patient Registration application decides to create a new patient John Smith, based on patient information input from Hospital Sun. At this time, however, there is a limited set of personal information traits of John Smith available. His date of birth, home address, and home phone number are unknown. The registration application creates the patient identity and sends a Patient Creation message to its downstream applications with the set of known personal information traits. " - (source: IHE Patient Administration Managemetn Use Cases page 103 §14.1)

IHE defines the Hospital Information System as the Patient Demographics Source sending the Patient Identity Feed (patient information) to the Patient Demographics Consumer i.e. the downstream application.

The following picture depicts the exact use case and actors (roles) defined by IHE:

The role of SAP Patient Management in the above use case

Note: We combined the use case with pre-connectathon test case by using the test data e.g. Patient Bob Frost described in the IHE test case. The pre-connectathon test cases are published in IHE Wiki site here. Our referenced test case is Nr.12101 PAM Create New Patient.

So in this case SAP Patient Management acts as the Patient Demographics Source. An admission clerk creates a new patient Bob Frost based on SAP Patient Management input from hospital Sun, after that SAP Patient Management sends the Patient Creation message to the downstream applications e.g. a laboratory system.

SAP Patient Management Enterprise Services vs. HL7 messages 

Let's go to a little bit deep into the technical architecture, please see the picture below. Basically there are 3 components that make the End-to-End integration possible:

• SAP Patient Management EhP4 (including the HL7 mappings in PI) as source
• A HL7 adapter
• The downstream applications e.g. a laboratory system as consumer

Below the 3 components are 3 message boxes (in yellow with numbers marked):

1. The outbound interface of Enterprise Service - "Inform of Patient Created"
2. The mapping from Enterprise Service interface to HL7-XML according to the HL7 XML Encoding Rules provided by HL7 organization - see link
3. The HL7 A28 message version 2.5

The Enterprise Services and the according mappings to HL7-XML are shipped in SAP Patient Management EhP4. 

The HL7 adapter part depends on your existing solution. You may already have a middleware to handle the HL7 communication; you may use an HL7 interface engine or you may also use any Open Source HL7 Interface. 

For demostration's purposes we used an open source HL7 Interface Engine which is Mirth.

The Demo:

    

Note: Please click the picture above to wathc the demo video.