Some Questions on my First Integration

Are there any resources/tutorials/workflows on how to go about my first HL7 integration? A list of best practices to follow when designing an interface? I unfortunately do not have anyone experienced to rely on and my very first connection is simply our LIS to our Mirth. I can do whatever I want with it, and that’s overwhelming because I don’t know how annoying it might end up being to transform future messages to the spec that I’m defining now. I just need ORM and ORU messages for a diagnostics lab that provides a single test right now (covid today, more tests in the future). I was hoping the LIS had a standard interface I could conform to, but they want the spec from me. I told them HL7 2.5.1 and I’ve got a sample message ready to provide, but I’d like to know if there are important considerations I should make or is it really that easy? It sounded that easy until I started looking at others’ sample messages in detail and how noncompliant they are. The state ELR gave me one that repeats an OBX segment multiple times (one for each AoE question). Character limits are basically nonexistent. Can I really just do whatever I want with these things? Is it easier to ask which rules should NOT be bent if I want to avoid headaches in the future? AoE (Ask on order Entry) questions are a big thing for covid reporting and contract tracing. Is there a better way to transmit those than repeating OBX segments? The only other consideration I’ve made is that I’m planning to add a prefix to the patient ID we receive from each client to ensure we don’t end up with duplicate IDs somewhere. We don’t have any contracts signed for further integrations today, but this is the kind of headache I really want to avoid.
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