The Microsoft BizTalk Accelerator for HL7 extends the capabilities of BizTalk Server 2004 for health care providers by delivering a comprehensive HL7 messaging solution that enables sharing of patient information within and between healthcare organizations.

Today’s healthcare industry moves faster than ever. Healthcare providers face a daunting challenge: to provide the best clinical care in a complex and costly environment. Information Technology can play a valuable role in facing these challenges, but are your IT systems up to the challenge?

For most healthcare organizations, the answer is no. Year after year of cost increases and cutbacks, combined with mergers and on-going staff shortages have created unique pressures for Healthcare providers and tangled their technology. While the need to integrate a myriad of IT applications and systems throughout organizations continues to grow, healthcare providers can no longer afford drawn-out integration projects and long-term returns.

This current environment has changed both the rationale and the techniques that healthcare providers use in defining, purchasing, and implementing integration solutions.

To provide real value to health care providers, integration and messaging solutions must deliver:

• Simplified infrastructure and reduced cost
• Greater flexibility to handle demands and changes in the healthcare field
• New, innovative components that are easy to use and implement
• An inherent ability to drive down costs, even as they support high-quality care with the right information in the right place at all times

Microsoft delivers next-generation, integration solutions that meet these unique demands of healthcare providers. BizTalk Server 2004 and BizTalk Accelerator for HL7 change the economics of hospital messaging and integration making it possible for Healthcare providers to leverage application integration technology in solving business challenges. BizTalk Server 2004 and BizTalk Accelerator for HL7 reduce the complexity of healthcare integration, and deliver rapid return on investment through accelerated deployment times and simplified architectures. BizTalk Server 2004 provides a flexible integration platform allowing health care providers to easily integrate their existing IT investments, develop robust business processes and analyze these processes. The BizTalk Accelerator for HL7 simplifies the integration process by providing pre-built and comprehensive support for HL7 messaging.

BizTalk Accelerator for HL7 delivers a robust messaging solution that enables healthcare providers to appropriately communicate patient information within and between healthcare organizations, allowing them to focus on patient care.

• Comprehensive HL7 messaging solution. The BizTalk Accelerator for HL7 eases the integration of HL7 messaging into your existing environment providing all necessary HL7 v 2.x schema, in addition to validation rules and connectivity requirements.
• Faster Time to Value. BizTalk Accelerator for HL7 decreases Healthcare providers’ time to value by leveraging comprehensive, pre-built HL7 schemas and messaging capabilities combined with industry-leading tools and skill sets for ease of customization. Companies typically experience reduced solution acquisition and implementation costs, lower training costs and fewer on-going costs with implementations in weeks, instead of months, all yielding more immediate customer value.
• Foundational Technology for Healthcare. Microsoft is committed to helping healthcare providers improve the delivery and finance of healthcare. BizTalk Server and BizTalk Accelerator for HL7 provide a flexible foundation for providers to develop their IT infrastructure beyond HL7. It is ideal for integrating applications within and across hospitals and clinics.

Comprehensive Messaging Across Health Care Organizations

As health care providers now look toward integration and messaging as a way to simplify their infrastructure and reduce cost, they also seek greater flexibility to handle the demanding and changing healthcare field. They are also looking to new, innovative, easy to use and implement components to help drive down cost of implementation and maintenance, so provider organizations can get the right information at the right place that helps them deliver high-quality and timely care.

Microsoft's HL7 solution is based on proven components, starting with Microsoft® Windows Server System™ integrated server software and the intuitive, powerful end-user tools provided by Microsoft® Office applications. Combined with the open and extensible Microsoft® .Net Framework, these components create the foundation that connects health care providers to information providers and to their systems. With real-time application integration and efficient messaging across the organization, healthcare organizations can support real-time collaboration, manage knowledge more effectively, and deliver personalized information.

• Business Rules Framework. Offers a graphical user interface, the Business Rules Composer that developers, business analysts, and administrators can all use to efficiently develop and apply rules and policies. Developers can create vocabularies and bind business logic to data; business analysts can change policies practically in real time; and administrators can deploy and manage policies, and monitor the results. The framework is also extremely flexible and extensible: its functionality is fully exposed through public interfaces, allowing you great latitude in implementation to meet your business requirements.
• Enhanced Scalability. Construct massively scalable messaging and orchestration-based applications through scale-out architecture. BizTalk Server 2004 meets the demands of even the largest enterprises with built-in support for multi-processor servers, server clustering and integration with unlimited internal applications and external partners.
• Business Activity Monitoring. Getting the information you need at the right time is critical. Hospital care often depends on correct and timely access to information. The Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) framework in BizTalk Server gives you that advantage. By opening a window into running business processes, BAM provides business analysts direct visibility into transactions—an area that has traditionally been closed to them.
• Microsoft Visual Studio .NET Development Environment. Increased developer productivity through a common development environment, and inherit all the capabilities of Visual Studio .NET and the .NET Framework.

HL7 Solution Features

The BizTalk Accelerator for HL7 will deliver enhanced messaging capabilities, specific HL7 standard formats and schemas, and middleware integration tools. Highlights include:

• The complete set of schemas for all HL7 v2.x messages types and trigger events
• Unique Disassembler and Assembler components, which parse and serialize HL7 messages. These components also provide the ability to configure the level of message validation.
• A flexible and configurable adapter for HL7’s Minimal Lower Layer Protocol (MLLP)
• Automated and configurable support for standard HL7 message acknowledgement modes including original and enhances acknowledgements.
• The ability to process HL7 batch message protocols, as well as create a batch from individual messages, or split a batch into individual messages.
• A configurable auditing component that allows an organization to log access to confidential patient information contained within HL7 messages.
• A full, searchable audit trail. BizTalk Server can retain copies of the message at every stage of processing.
• Support for user inquiry functions, business activity monitoring type inquiry functions and health activity tracking inquiry functions for system-level analysis.
• Unlimited message storage, and archiving facilities concurrent with system operation
• High-availability, resilient server configurations
• Support for content-based routing of messages on any group of fields and/or sub-fields in a message

Meet your IT challenge today. Deliver greater care and returns for years to come.