Sending / Receiving Data Messages

Messaging is a means of allowing different computer systems to communicate with one another and share information. The Ascribe Message Engine allows Ascribe products to communicate both with Connecting for Health services, e.g., Choose and Book, and with any other  information system which can send or receive data .

Why a Message Engine? 

The Healthcare Agenda is moving rapidly to take advantage of new technologies. Messaging allows disparate organisations to work together and exchange information easily for the benefit of the patient, regardless of location and which particular IT system is in use.

New services can be located in the community, close to the Patient, and electronic communication ensures that others involved in their care have on-line access to the information, such as test results.

Taking a generic approach to messaging future-proofs the solution, allows development costs to be shared between Ascribe’s systems, and may reduce the timescale for developing new messaging links.

Avoiding the pitfalls – how Ascribe can help you.

Messaging between systems can be problematic, if the organisations involved do not map the information flows in advance. For example, how should the solution deal with invalid messages from other systems? What if incorrect or incomplete data from another system or service overwrites good data on the Ascribe system? How can one be sure the message is matched to the correct local patient? How does it cope with multiple potential matches? The Message Engine design deals effectively with these pitfalls.
Ascribe staff can provide consultancy services to:

• Help identify and document the business benefits which such interfaces can bring
• Work with organisations , assisting them to use IT effectively to support the re-design of service protocols , where needed to facilitate new  inter- organisational processes
• Help the Organisations map the information flows and define the rules of data interchange,
• Support the realisation of the business benefits of implementing these interface messages.

What does the Message Engine do?

The Message Engine contains the message definitions and rules for the messages an organisation needs to send and receive. The Message engine has  a ‘monitoring’ role inside your IT system. In the background it ’looks’ for particular events e.g. a new Referral or a missed appointment. When an event is recorded on any product using the Message Engine, this triggers the Message Engine to send the relevant data, formatted into the appropriate message format to the destination system., It also receives incoming messages from others systems, validates them and  carries out the appropriate updates or requests for data.

The ‘events’ which can trigger a message to be sent and the  data which is ‘packaged’ into messages is specified by the Organisation(s) who ‘uses’ the system or by National Standards organisations such as C4H.

Industry Standards

The Message Engine supports the industry standards for messaging between systems: HL7 and XML, in additional to supporting  local formats. The design of the solution allows support to be added for virtually any messaging format, thus allowing Ascribe to keep its products up-to-date with new industry standards for messaging.

Connecting for Health messaging

Messaging is crucial to Ascribe’s support for Connecting for Health (CfH) in England, and similar projects in other parts of the UK. Messaging projects for CfH connectivity currently include:

• Choose and Book – the electronic appointment booking system
• Electronic Transfer of Prescriptions (ETP)
• Personal Demographics Service (PDS)
• GP-to-GP patient record transfer (GP2GP)

Local system messaging

Many care organisations require links from their Ascribe system to local information systems. Local messaging projects currently include messages covering the following information:

• Patient demographics
• Pathology tests
• Assessments (in particular, Single Assessment Process)
• Maternity records
• Baby records
• Referrals
• Clinic sessions
• Staff details
• Patient Consent
• Related people
• Children
• Care Pathways
• Contacts & Episodes

Error handling

The Message Engine validates messages to ensure they meet the standards of the message definition. If an incoming message is invalid, it will not simply be discarded. The message is logged as not processed for the system administrator to review and act upon.

Preventing inappropriate overwrites

Where discrepancies arise between locally stored information and incoming messages (e.g., patient address), the Message Engine may be configured not to simply overwrite local information. Instead the message can be placed in the Manual Intervention File allowing the system administrator to decide whether to accept the amendment from the incoming message, or whether to keep the local data. This is feature is used o prevent address overwrite problems in PDS messages.