HL7 Data Mapping Help
by Matthew ~ June 21st, 2007. Filed under: Deliverables, Tips.
Recently over on the Neotool blog, David Shaver wrote about how data mapping to and from HL7 is an important part of any integration project. Invariably, systems are implemented with their own unique business drivers and decision making process. This means that though there is a very rigid and clear standard to follow, it usually is not followed very closely for various reasons.
I happen to be knee deep in an enterprise-wide HL7 integration project where forward and reverse HL7 mapping is key to each project. Our goal has been to stick to the 2.5 standard as closely as possible. To this requires not only mapping but also scrubbing data through a forced vocabulary to standardize terminology between systems. This is also helping us pave the way to an upgrade to version 3 if and when we need to.
One of the things we had to do was put together a way to map each segment to other systems and databases. This required a very large spreadsheet of all possible HL7 values mapped to each of our systems: other systems using an older version of HL7, EDI feeds, data marts, and the data warehouse.
This was a pretty simple (but time consuming) task. I thought I would help save anyone else going through this some time by publishing the spreadsheet we used to do our mappings. It contains almost every segment, position. and also most of the recommended lookup values. As we roll out the complete set of segments, I will release a new version with a complete mapping. This should get you started though. If you have any recommendations on how to improve this, please let me know.
You can grab the xls, here. [updated]
June 24th, 2007 at 9:30 am
[...] HL7 Data Mapping Help [...]
June 30th, 2007 at 5:29 am
[...] prompted this post was discovering this effort to capture HL7 segments, fields and tables in an Excel spreadsheet. Pity that the link to the file [...]
August 2nd, 2007 at 9:44 am
Hey Matthew,
Very nice spreadsheet: I’m interested to know how you created it. Surely not by hand? If using some kind of tool-chain, are you prepared to share the details? I am in exactly the position you describe in your post, but I’m using v2.3 mostly. How many (significant) differences are there between 2.5 and 2.3?
Many thanks,
Roger Searjeant
August 2nd, 2007 at 11:20 am
Hi Roger -
Actually, I did this the old fashioned way. It was a little tedious but it was the only way to capture our requirements and it’s still not complete. The difference between 2.3 and 2.5 depend on what type of data you are transporting. For things like billing and admissions the differences are not pretty easy to navigate - for laboratory data the differences are much greater.