Posted on behalf of Marianne Soucy, Director Client Solutions

With many hospitals preparing for influxes of COVID patients, how to handle Patient moves and bed transfers has seen a sudden spike. LTC patients being moved to different units is one good example of this activity, moving patients to isolation units is another.

While most HCIS’s require an A17 HL7 Message to account for a bed swap (because it tracks which beds are occupied), sometimes other vendors do not know how to correctly process an A17 message. We’ve seen requests to send it as two A08’s instead, or as an A02/A08, or other combinations.

Some examples of vendors we have heard reported not to like A17’s include FormFast, CDR2, and Traceview, I’m sure there are others. Using the SAM mapper (or the Summit Scripting Toolkit if you are not using our engine), a message can be reformatted, split, or cloned to accommodate these needs.

The high level concept here is:

  • You will keep the original message as “Message A” and delete the segments you don’t want (Second PV1 PV2), but first move them into variables.
  • Then you will Concatenate String the MSH and other parts you want to keep (Ex: MSH EVN and PID) and the parts you deleted from Message A (second PV1 PV2). This will become Message B.
  • You probably will need to append a .1 or other differentiator into the Message Control ID (Make Message 12345 into 12345.1 for the cloned message for example).
  • You will create Message B as a string, to deliver it as a new message, I would use the Send to MSMQ command.
    • You could also write it out to a file for pickup, if this is SST or you are not using MSMQ.
  • Then you would have a receiver take anything in that queue or file folder and deliver it to your sender.

We have a few variations of sample maps on our client area that do this, here are some links to the source code posted publicly for download to our EC and SE clients. If you do not have permission to these maps but need them, drop me a line and I can send you the map directly ([email protected])! Or learn more on the Customer Support site.

I’ll also be presenting this and other uses cases in a webcast on Wednesday, April 29th @ 2pm. Register HERE.