HL7 / EDI file using TCP/ IP over VPN : –
- Considering the challenges and effort needed to make this happen, I am surprised to see this is still the technology we use to get integrated with most of the healthcare entities such as clinics, hospitals..etc.
- In reality, Once the Small Sized Clinics choose the EMR, they tend to stay with it for years and most of them may not opt for the premium support offered by these EMR vendors. Hence the software in the clinic remains old-school and it get hard to get integrated with such EMR using other communication medium.
- Main pain point getting integrated using this method, – Network teams from both the ends needs to get involved, exchange the Firewall settings, IP Address, Port numbers and make a Hole in both Firewall so the packets can traverse through it.
- Chances of VPN connectivity going down can be seen often – whenever either entity do any modifications in the Firewall rules / policies.
- Here the message would be transmitted in the Transport layer of OSI, hence the overhead of the layers above transport is eliminated.
- We can use “ telnet 10.XX.XX.XX <port>” in the command prompt to check if the VPN connectivity is up.
- I would recommend this only to entities such as big hospitals / insurance companies which has multiple locations across the country and want to
- Save over the network bandwidth during exchange of healthcare data (HL7 or HIPAA ) files.
- Reduce transmission latency.
- Afford a good network team.
sFTP : –
…To be contd.
Think Integration 