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Diabetes register made easy with HL7 |
The diabetes annual cycle of care incentive payment has been very popular with practices, however maintaining an electronic diabetes register that keeps track of the last time a blood pressure review or an HbA1C level was recorded has been very time consuming – until now.
Electronic diabetes register
Currently, when you download pathology into your medical software, the computer receives the patient’s results as a picture and is unable to recognise each individual result. To put it simply, the computer could be receiving a picture of a house for all it knows, it cannot recognise what the picture contains. As the computer is unable to differentiate between the different pathology results, it therefore cannot separate the results to plug them into specific fields in your clinical database.
As an example, to use the Medical Director diabetes register so that you can track the patient’s annual cycle of care, pathology results are accessed manually and then transposed into the diabetes assessment or diabetes record. The date attributed to the results is then automatically entered onto the diabetes register, however this process is time consuming and carries a risk of data entry error.
What is HL7?
With HL7, each pathology test is given a specific code, so that when the computer downloads the pathology into the patient’s result file, the computer can also look for coded tests and then place them into their appropriate fields in the diabetes record. Instead of the computer seeing an unknown ‘picture’, it recognises each individual result, enters them into the patient’s file and then searches for other places in the software where it can enter the results to build the clinical database – with no doubling up of entry.
To enable pathology downloads in HL7 code, simply contact your pathology provider on the following numbers:
Sullivan Nicolaides IT Support:
1800 100 769
QML (Steve Osborne):
(07) 3840 4522
Unfortunately Northern Rivers Pathology are unable to download pathology in HL7 code, however they are going to run some field testing on the NRDGP computer some time in the future and will let us know. And if you would like any help with building a diabetes register, please contact your friendly practice liaison officer at the division on 6622 4453.
Therese Greenlees, Kirsty Nicholls and Lorena Martin are the division’s practice liaison officers.
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