Thursday 14 April 2016

What’s the difference between A04 and A28 message

HL7 seems to have a whole lot of event types that sound similar, and it is often difficult to see through the nuances in the definitions.  Today I was asked the difference between an A04 (Register a Patient) and an A28 (Add person information), so I thought I would share it.

An A04 is an event that signifies a patient has arrived or checked in for an outpatient visit, that is they are going in for a one off visit and they are not allocated a bed. An A28 is a transfer of a person’s demographic information between systems. It doesn’t need to be triggered from a patients arrival or anything like that. For instance the patient information may be of no immediate use to the other systems, but knowledge of the patient may come in handy later so they are updated with an A28. Further, an A28 isn’t necessarily about a patients, but could represent other people to other systems e.g. Patient guarantors, or records for a registry database.

No comments:

Post a Comment