What is HL7 and how does it affect Medical Transcription?

When healthcare facility come across references to HL7 in the context of medical transcription and one always wonder what it is and how it affects healthcare business.

HL7 or Health Level 7 is a standards development organization that is accredited by the American National Standards (ANSI). HL7 creates standards that define how to represent and communicate data related to healthcare.

The importance of having resources and tools that can accept HL7 based transmissions is emphasized in medical transcription. Medical transcription is the process through which the audio records of the patients are transcribed into computer files.

These records form the basis for record keeping, further treatment, and referral to other doctors, as information for insurance claims, as evidence in case of litigation or part of the patient’s Electronic Medical Record. That means that the information in a patient record needs to be shared with various sources.

HL7 focuses on the interface necessities of the whole healthcare organization.  HL7 functions as a standard to ensure that critical healthcare information is made available to various sources without the meaning getting lost.

When a healthcare facility decides to assess the medical transcription service provider on the following criteria:

• Accuracy: This means the percentage of accuracy of the completed transcripts vis-à-vis what was dictated. A minimum of 99% and above would be acceptable.

• Turnaround time: Turnaround time refers to the time taken to revert the transcribed report to the healthcare facility. A Turnaround time of not more than 24 hours for normal reports and 4-12 hours for STAT reports would be considered ideal.

• Data security: The Company being outsourced to should be HIPAA compliant. The Medical Transcription Company has to have adequate security measures to ensure that the confidential data transmitted back and forth is safe and secure.

·       Pricing: This is one of the main benefits that a healthcare facility hopes to have, from the outsourcing option. Pricing should be fair and reasonable for the services rendered. Pricing method should also be transparent and simple so that both parties can verify the same at any stage of the process

·       HL7 integration: It is important to ascertain that the service provider has the ability to interface with other systems in the form of HL7 messages. This would enable easy integration with any EMR system.

TransDyne has the resources and tools to accept HL7 based ADT (Abstract Data Types)/ order transmissions via TCP (Transmission Control Protocol)/IP (Internet Protocol), HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol Server) and /or VPN (Virtual Private Network). TransDyne also has the capabilities to transmit back the transcribed document as a HL7 message back to client's interface engine via TCP/IP, HTTPS and or VPN.

ADT feeds accepted for acquiring patient scheduling and demographic information can be done using standard of customized ADT messages. Transcribed reports are transmitted back as text or rich text embedded in multiple ORU segments in a single HL7 message.

For clients needing integration with EMR’s requiring reports to be sent back as HL7 messages, TransDyne can configure the interfaces and deliver reports as HL7 messages and at no additional cost to the client.

TransDyne offers quality medical transcription at reasonable prices, executed by experienced and qualified medical transcriptionists with a very quick turnaround time executed through secure HIPAA and HITECH compliant channels, with very high levels of accuracy and all this with technology that is advanced but easy to use!            

To avail complete medical transcription solutions from TransDyne, click here.