Contact — Tanya Laino 707.462.6369 HEALDSBURG, CALIF. — November 21, 2008 — Early this year Alliance Medical Center received a grant from California HealthCare Foundation to demonstrate a simple software tool to receive electronic laboratory results in the new ELINCS format. ELINCS (“EHR Laboratory Interoperability and Connectivity Specification”) is a messaging system intended to standardize the electronic reporting of test results from clinical laboratories into electronic health record (EHR) systems. A new “HL7-R1” format of ELINCS was adopted by HL7 this past Summer. Today Alliance Medical Center is joined by two partners in releasing a technical specification titled “Using Mirth to transform HL7 v2.x into ELINCS (HL7-R1).”
Redwood MedNet, a health information exchange in Northern California, transformed electronic laboratory test results from Healdsburg District Hospital into the new ELINCS format by using the Mirth open source integration engine. The software engineering was led by WebReach, Inc., a healthcare services company located in Irvine, California. The transformed laboratory results were delivered to Alliance Medical Center, a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) located in Healdsburg, California, starting in April 2008. In October, delivery of the electronic laboratory results was expanded to other other medical practices in the Sonoma County region of California. The specification document released today gives step by step instructions on the conversion of a plain HL7 v2.x laboratory test result message into the new ELINCS (HL7-R1) format, so that other health care facilities can build their own ELINCS channel with the Mirth open source integration engine.
The instructions are released under the GNU Free Documentation License, and can be downloaded from the Redwood MedNet website at http://www.redwoodmednet.org/projects/hie/docs/amc_elincs_20081121.pdf.
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Alliance Medical Center www.alliancemed.org
Alliance Medical Center is a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) located in Healdsburg, California.
Redwood MedNet www.redwoodmednet.org
Redwood MedNet is a nonprofit Health Information Exchange (HIE) located in Ukiah, California
WebReach, Inc. www.webreachinc.com
WebReach, Inc., a healthcare engineering services company located in Irvine, California, builds and supports the open source Mirth integration engine.
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