Question: HL7 v2 message processing rules

Feb 1, 2016

Question

I have a question on patient registration message A04. We process the A04 message in the following way:

When our system receives A04 for processing, we contruct a QBP and send to MPI and wait for an RSP message response from the MPI. Based on the RSP response we either register the patient by sending an AA or reject by sending an AR.

We notice that sometimes this process may take up to 45 minutes to complete and within this time we receive mpi updates for this patient.

If our system received mpi updates for this patient while this patients registration is in process

  1. should we return patient not found as patient is not registered yet.
  2. should we Wait for the patient registration to complete before processing mpi update message. Is the above requirement in any of the hl7 document?

Answer:

No. there is no specific rules about stuff like this in the base HL7 v2 standard. You have to get specific agreement on a site to site basis. Some specific national or vendor implementation guides do include specific messaging processing rules of this nature, but I’m not aware of any implementation guide that’s relevant to your question.

So you’ll have to make a decision based on customer desires. 45 minutes does sound like a really long time - that’s the kind of delay that clearly calls for business rules, and these are going to vary from installation to installation.