Accelero Connect ™

A recent HIMSS Analytics white paper reports that most of the hospitals studied use physiologic and vital signs monitors but the majority are not interfacing the devices with their EMRs, meaning that time-consuming and error-prone processes are still in place.

Accelero Connect takes multiple and often disparate inbound ORU (result) message interfaces from physiological and/or vital signs monitors and creates a short-term repository of this data for downstream system integration initiatives (e.g. Nursing Documentation, EDIS, Quality Reporting initiatives, Patient Surveillance). Accelero Connect can aggregate results data from multiple monitors and perform customer-configured matching algorithms before formatting the data and sending to the appropriate downstream systems. All of this is accomplished completely vendor agnostic.

Accelero Connectis a fast and affordable alternative to an enterprise interface engine for your organization. When used in this fashion, Accelero Connect consumes a single HL7 feed from a source system (e.g. an ADT interface) and makes it available to multiple systems within the walls of your organization.

Accelero Connect allows you to maximize your interface investment with your vendors without having to purchase expensive duplicative interfaces. Not all downstream systems can accept data in the same format, but Accelero Connect is designed to accommodate multiple message specification requirements via a built-in configuration management tool.

Today, numerous healthcare organizations are connecting their systems with those of their community physicians, and many ambulatory EMR systems are standardizing on the Continuity of Care Document (CCD) for clinical document exchange. The CCD is part of the HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) intended to specify the coding, structure and semantics of clinical documents for exchange. While several physician EMR systems can consume CCD documents, most hospital-based information technology systems are not equipped to create or consume CCD documents.

Accelero Connect can consume a CCD as an input and then output multiple HL7 messages, or conversely it can receive multiple HL7 messages and create a CCD document to meet the needs of the sending and receiving systems.

There are many times when the ideal solution to a healthcare data integration problem would require connecting multiple HL7 data sources into one vendor’s HL7-enabled application, but that vendor has a licensing model that requires additional costs per inbound HL7 feed. This common scenario can quickly increase the cost for what is a technically simple requirement.

The traditional solution in healthcare IT has been to leverage the organization’s investment in integration engine technology to address such scenarios; however, the interface licensing costs can also quickly turn a simple project into a cost-prohibitive problem.

Accelero Connect is an affordable way to capture healthcare data information that is transacted via HL7 messaging and share it with document imaging systems. Accelero Connect takes inbound HL7 messages and converts them to report formats such as rich text, PDF, PDF/H (PDF-Healthcare) or plain text, and sends them to document imaging systems over defined capture ports.

In today’s healthcare IT environment, integration of multiple HL7-enabled hardware and software solutions is very common. Unfortunately, there often are instances where both ends of the communication channel are implemented as TCP/IP servers, and the organization’s interface engine cannot adequately or reliably handle the configuration.

Accelero Connect solves this problem by providing a reliable and scalable solution for HL7 messaging between data sources configured as TCP/IP servers. This server-to-server messaging gateway solution works well when HL7 messages originating in a system acting as a server need to be delivered to nursing documentation systems, document imaging systems or print locations (after being converted into a printer-friendly format).

Configuring Accelero Connect as an HL7 Feed Aggregator is a cost-effective solution to the common requirement of aggregating multiple HL7 feeds into a single feed.