Research On The Key Technology Of Laboratory Information System's Normal Communication Based On HL7

Hospital Information System (HIS) had brought a revolutionary change to the routine work of hospital. HIS helped all departments of hospital to collect, store, process, retrieve and communicate the Patient Care Information and Administrative Management Information. Due to the use range of HIS getting more and more broad, its function and affair were more complex. As a result, HIS must be divided into several modules. For example, Laboratory Information System, PACS, RIS wered playing their roles in HIS. However, while these modules dealing with their own information, they had to obtain a great deal of information from relative modules synchronously, as well as sending any information to others. Consequently, the problem of how to integrate all information in various system should be faced.Health Level Seven was a medical information exchange protocol, which was based on the 7^th. level of OSI. It had been developed rapidly since the occurrence of the first edition in 1987. Moreover, the version 2.3, published in 1997, was certificated by ANSI. After that, HL7 was used in hospitals of North America, Europe, Japan and Australia. Nowadays, HL7 had become the international standard of medical information exchange. Unfortunately, HL7 was just beginning to be used in China. So this paper took research on the key technologies of medical informationexchange based on HL7, which had the background of sLIS, a laboratory information system developed by BME of Nanfang Medical University.The conception of Digital Labortary and LIS, as well as the their frame and status in quo was introduced at the beginning. And then, the characteristic of several familiar medical information standard, including HL7, DICOM, ASTM and LOINC, was contrasted. HL7 was considered as the most authoritative and flexible one. Moreover it had been certificated by many organization and manufacturers. So it was fit for being used in LIS' standardization.HL7 was not only suitable for exchanging the information within hospital, such as health records, clinical test results and financial reports, but also for the information go beyond hospital, insurance company and superintendent. Its aim was to provide a information exchange and management standard for all hospital information system. Before information be exchanged, the data in different format should be transformed into the standard messages according to HL7 rules. And then, it could be sent to receiver in the light of certain network protocol such as TCP/IP, FTP or E-mail. After validated by application layer of receiver, messages should be sent to terminal application by which messages could be transformed back to data according to HL7 rules. The latest edition, HL7 v3, was constructed from above to below in the guide of object-oriented methord. The extensible markup language was used as its message express manner, which brought it readability and maneuverability.Afterward, the object-oriented software engineering method was introduced into the modeling of LIS information standard exchange. During this part, the Reference Information Model was analyzed, and the technology implement scheme was also brought out. The Reference Information Model described the content of all information in HL7 workgroup, it was the model of total information concerning with HL7. To the data content of all HL7 message, RIM was a shared information modeling resource, which can supply data and conception reuse in mulripleinformation structure. It must be considered when modeling to communication method of HL7 that HL7 was only a information exchange standard, not including the implement method. Thereby, different information system might use it in different way, without saying different coding style. During the procedure of modeling to the information exchange process, in order to describe the huge complex information system expressly, it was necessary to use object-oriented software engineering technology and the Unified Modeling Language.In following part, two dissimilar apply modes, that was, HL7 Ready and HL7 Engine was discussed, besides, their character and scope were analyzed. It was confirmed that the HL7 Engine mode was easier to be implemented withal fit for the standardization of LIS' communication. By far the material implementation technology had been ascertained. After that a program was generated to construct and parse the HL7 message, recuring to which the feasibility of the key technology concerning with HL7' actualization in HIS was testified. At last, going with the farther development of HL7, some problems that could come forth was enumerated. It was considered that localization of HL7 protocol should be the hardcore of HIS standardization in the future.