Using Messaging Workbench for National Case Reporting: Status Update, Challenges and Lessons Learned

Objectives: The PHIN Messaging and Vocabulary Standards team held a workshop at last PHIN conference to present the plan for new artifacts that specify the structure and content of the Case Notification to CDC.  Part of that plan included the formalization of message structural specifications as profiles produced from Messaging Workbench (MWB).  This abstract discusses the progress made towards creating Health Level Seven (HL7) message profiles in the past year.
Methods: MWB is a tool developed by the Veterans Administration specifically for managing HL7 2.x message profiles.  MWB is promoted as a tool for management of message profiles by facilitating the creation of datatype and segment libraries that can be re-used, providing a degree of consistency between various CDC-sponsored message implementations.  The tool may also be used to validate messages based on a profile.
Findings: Setting up the PHIN standard libraries with MWB proved to be more cumbersome than anticipated.  MWB had some defects that caused problems with creating and maintaining data type and segment libraries.  Some defects have been corrected, and a few enhancements have been made in the past year as a result of collaboration with the MWB developer.  The original plan to produce profiles that tightly constrain all of the content (questions and standard vocabulary) for a particular message proved to be impractical; consequently, these profiles are only used to validate structural integrity.
Conclusion: Despite the challenges encountered with using Messaging Workbench, the team continues on a path to publish message profile artifacts with this tool.  Output for publication is a Microsoft Word format that looks much like a structural specification, as well as XML that can be used by a data sender or receiver to validate messages.