My (tiny – I’m literally the only technical person) company is doing claims analytics work and we’ve only had one client so far. They gave use CSV dumps of patients and claims, which were easy to import into our database, and we haven’t spent time developing more sophisticated data integration because we’ve been focused on the core functionality. We now are expected to get some new customers, but they’re much larger and I expect they’ll want to use HL7/FHIR, or some other standard for transferring data. Our model is for a bulk transfer of past claims data (diagnosis codes, dates, providers at a minimum), and some patient demographics. I built our original import functionality on top of Nextgen Connect (Mirth) assuming that it would be a good base for subsequent data integration efforts, but taking on HL7 or FHIR in their entirety is pretty daunting, and I don’t even know what to prepare for. Should I expect a batch of ADT message? DFT? It seems like DFT with DG1 and DRG segments would cover our needs, but I could spend the next few weeks building something that transforms that into our needs, just to find out the “real-world” never uses those for this purpose. Alternatively, I could draw up a json schema for our own custom model that would have just the things we need now – that makes my life easier, but if I were the large customer company, I wouldn’t want a custom integration unless it was absolutely necessary. Am I wrong about that? Finally, regarding FHIR, I could dive into that and prepare for a bundle message with patients and claims, but I don’t know whether FHIR is really all that common yet, and building for all the codable concepts in the model isn’t going to be something I can do well in a short amount of time. I think that would be a great place to put our energies for the long term, but we’ve been struggling during the pandemic and if we don’t get a customer this month, we’re probably dead as a company anyhow, so I want to put my efforts where they will most likely pay off. Edit – just to say Thanks in advance, because I should’ve said it the first time and I don’t want my Grandma to come back and haunt me about it!
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