By Lisa Spear
Sleep labs, and an awful lot of medical offices in general, are by many accounts stuck in the past when it comes to transmitting healthcare data. Go into any sleep disorders center in the United States, and the odds are high that you will see a fax machine somewhere behind the front desk and a sleep tech struggling to balance clerical duties with patient care. The typical sleep lab just can’t seem to shake what many believe are antiquated, and sometimes redundant, ways of exchanging healthcare data.
Now, according to sleep diagnostics companies, there is evidence that the ways health systems exchange patient information are changing as more sleep lab owners/operators invest in Health Level Seven (HL7), a standard protocol for transferring clinical and administrative health data between electronic medical records systems, sleep software programs, and other medical systems.
Global manufacturer of medical electronics Nihon Kohden is seeing exponential growth in interest in HL7, with approximately 75% to 80% of sleep clients requesting it in the past year, up from the early days when only 5% to 10% of sleep labs opted for HL7 integration, according to information provided by the company. Neurodiagnostic and sleep diagnostics company Cadwell has also reported seeing interest in HL7 pick up, with a 60% increase in the number of sleep labs using HL7 integration between 2021 and 2024.
While HL7 is nothing new, first emerging in the 1980s, many factors are driving its rise in integration in the sleep lab. As the awareness of sleep health and the demand for sleep testing soar, many seek ways to become more efficient in the face of cost-cutting initiatives and staffing constraints.
“‘I used to have two secretaries who would help me…They are no longer with us, so I need to find another way to be efficient,’” a sleep lab manager recently told Felipe Lerida, RPSGT, clinical product development manager for sleep diagnostics company Neurovirtual USA.
“In the past, these sites had specific employees that would manage a lot of the heavy lifting,” says Lerida. “That is now being streamlined, and a big reason is to save costs.”
Rise of HL7: The Sleep Lab’s ‘Digital Mailman’
The HL7 protocol cuts down on the error-prone process of manually typing patient data, so staff can concentrate on serving patients instead of shuffling paperwork in and out of fax machines.
HL7 integration “alleviates the burden of administrative tasks, allowing sleep providers and technologists to dedicate their time toward higher-value tasks, such as analyzing results and delivering personalized care,” says James Blevins, RPSGT, Cadwell’s sleep diagnostics product manager.
The biggest obstacle to setting up HL7 for sleep labs is often the cost, both monetarily and in personnel, says Dave Weiler, vice president of IT for MedBridge Healthcare, a national provider of sleep lab management services to hospitals and physician practices.
To set up an HL7 interface, a hospital system must allocate a team of engineers, programmers, and project managers to build the infrastructure, which, depending on the complexity, could take three months to a year, says Weiler, who has worked in IT for the sleep industry for 24 years.
Once the HL7 interface is set up, it is very low maintenance and pays dividends by returning time and resources to hospital staff. Sleep labs that use HL7 can expect to save up to 40 minutes per sleep study, Weiler estimates.
In the past, HL7 integration was prohibitively expensive because hospitals would hire electronic medical records companies to set up the interface, Lerida says. He has seen the sector grow in the last 10 to 15 years, and prices have come down. “Hospitals have gotten so big that they have their own HL7 programmers that could program the process for them, so it minimizes the cost,” says Lerida. “A lot of hospitals are now way more open to it.”
With HL7, each patient’s healthcare information is auto-populated into the electronic medical records after being manually entered just once. When a sleep study is done, the results can immediately and electronically link to the patient’s medical records for the referring physician to view.
HL7 can also help streamline sleep lab operations with the option to import patient data and/or appointments and export the data in different formats, including PDF reports.
“You can think of it like a mailman who delivers the messages between the software of the sleep diagnostic system and the hospital information system. With normal mail you need to write an address in a specific format to get your letter delivered; HL7 does the same but digital,” says Tinta Visser, head of product management at SOMNOmedics, a global sleep diagnostics company that offers HL7 integration.
“Due to the complexities of sleep medicine, a patient usually sees several doctors from different disciplines before they are transferred to the sleep lab. Having a hospital information system where all the patient information is collected and stored in one place helps doctors have a complete overview of the patient’s health and supports them in their decision-making,” says Visser.
Weiler says that while the majority of the approximately 140 sleep labs that MedBridge Healthcare works with still don’t have HL7 integration, the number of those adopting the protocol is picking up.
Its proliferation has seen a steep rise in sleep medicine practices in recent years, becoming more of a priority as sleep labs work to improve efficiency to meet the needs of a higher volume of patients.
“The automation. The efficiency. The effectiveness. Now, patients can be seen much quicker,” says Andrew Ehrenberg, BSc, REEGT, CNIM, FASET, director of neurology marketing and business development at Nihon Kohden. “The patients can be followed up on much quicker. All of those things are allowed by HL7 within the sleep realm.”
Reference
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