PHLIP Influenza Message Implementation

PHLIP Influenza Message Implementation

 

 PHLIP, the Public Health Laboratory Interoperability Project, surfaced from within the laboratory community with the mission to address the need to share lab data electronically.  Representatives from APHL, State Public Health Laboratories (SPHL), CDC’s Coordinating Center for Infectious Diseases(CCID) and National Center for Public Health Informatics (NCPHI) , driven by the need for increased Pan-Influenza Preparedness, agreed on a pilot implementation as proof of concept, where SPHLs from California, Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska and Virginia would send their results to the CDC Influenza Division using Public Health Information Network Messaging Service (PHIN-MS) and Health Level Seven (HL7).

 PHLIP continues to tackle the barriers and is also working on vocabulary harmonization of other National Notifiable Diseases (NNDs) and bi-directional electronic data exchange between public health partners.  Working as a Community of Purpose, we achieved sending of production level unsolicited results messages from 4 of the states to the CDC Influenza Division in April 2008.   The PHLIP Message Implementation Work Group, consisting of laboratory, IT and data standard SMEs from all SPHLs and CDC, created the first PHLIP implementation guide (HL7 v2.3.1 ORU^R01) for unsolicited result reporting of Influenza.   The content of this guide is populated using the PHLIP encoding guidelines, which help to translate the harmonized influenza vocabulary and mapping workbook of required value sets into the message segments for HL7 Observation reporting.   The working groups collaboratively defined the validation processes needed to ensure correct and secure data transmission with NCPHI’s Data Brokering team providing structural message validation and content validation by CDC Influenza Division in cooperation with the PHLIP Core Vocabulary Team.   This presentation will explain the PHLIP structure, the processes and decisions for collaboration and lessons learned during implementation