Health Level Seven (HL7), a healthcare IT standards development organization, has released its Messaging Standard Version 2.5.1 to support the Clinical Laboratory Improvements Amendment (CLIA) for the exchange of electronic laboratory information.
According to HL7, additional features to Version 2.5.1 include:
- An improved Observation/Result (OBX) segment of the standard to support compliance with CLIA and California state regulations.
- Updates to the Observation Request (OBR) and Common Order (ORC) segments to support compliance with the ELINCS standard.
The CLIA was passed by Congress in 1988 to establish quality standards for all laboratory testing to ensure the accuracy, reliability and timeliness of patient test results regardless of where the test was performed, says the Ann Arbor, Mich.-based standards organization. Version 2.5.1 currently addresses the interfaces among various healthcare IT systems that send or receive a variety of healthcare data, serving as the vehicle for disparate applications and data architectures operating in a heterogeneous system environment to communicate with each other.
