Admission-discharge-transfer gateway interface: A health level 7 application

Abstract

This paper presents a software application called Admission-Discharge- Transfer (ADT) Gateway Interface. This interface uses the Health Level 7 (HL7) standard to bridge the hospital computer systems for maintaining hospital bed occupancy.1 ADT Gateway Interface is a Microsoft VB.NET application that utilizes the Microsoft Windows TCP/IP socket to communicate with the Hospital Information System (HIS) ADT System. Received messages are processed using a custom Microsoft Windows DLL called HL7Messaging DLL and information presented inside these messages are put into a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database. Hospital computer systems reach to this SQL Server 2005 database to examine the bed occupancy in the hospital. Furthermore, states and errors of this ADT Gateway Interface are recorded. This helps design engineers in measuring performance and observing failures and recoveries. This may require detail log information from this application. In this study, a robust logging viewer design methodology is used to improve reliability and consistency of the overall integrated system.