I note that the official EpiSurv/LabSurv interface to populate the National Notifiable disease database for the Public Health Unit still specifies the use of HL7 v2.1 & 2.4 for integration purposes with labs and referrers to labs for disease testing. (https://surv.esr.cri.nz/LabSurv/index.php)
However, the public ESR Page showing statistics (https://nzcoviddashboard.esr.cri.nz/#!/) is frozen at August 2021, citing “Due to a system upgrade, we have to stop updating the dashboard temporarily. Sorry for the inconvenience”.
Can anyone point me to information about this upgrade and especially about whether this will affect the mechanisms to be used in future for APIs to allow Labs (and related shared service organisations) to do direct disease notifications via computational communications rather than human data entry.
Is this the ESR database? The one that is used for Covid results is Sysmex’s Eclair but you may be talking about something else. If it is @DebS can help you with the HL7 specs. The Covid ESR database now is using a FHIR API that the Northern Region DHBs have just finished piloting as well and we hope to get this live by May/June this year for all Northern Region results.
This is epiSurv - our national surveillance database, it took a back seat to the NCTS - National Contact Tracing System during COVID - integration between the two was put on the backlog and a lot of remediation went in around August last year - will contact them and see what they can do about the site - it’s actually got a misleading large read banner - as they do have cases until late December - so I suspect it’s more the extract and upload over the holiday period - and with them back are work next week can be sorted easily
Thanks Lara and Anna-Marie! We’re trying to work out whether a forthcoming project that we’re proposing to a client will be expected to connect to EpiSurv via their current LabSurv HL7 v2.x protocol, or whether it is being upgraded to FHIR to match the COVID notifications. For us it’s a matter of how the information is sent from non-humans (they have have a nice web form to fill in), but we wonder whether there’ll be FHIR interfaces for the non-COVID notifable diseases in the near future, or whether we’ll need to get some HL7 v2 libraries to integrate with a product we hope to deploy that will include labs talking to EpiSurv. (We think it’s the only-non FHIR API we would need to use, and that would be inconvenient. And as you know the pre-FHIR HL7 protocols are not open and public, so we might need to buy specifications as well.)
@lara - is there someone you know on the technical team at ESR/EpiSruv who knows about their upcoming plans? Or shall I just contact them via the details on their web site?
Hi Kieth - yes DM me and I can make some introductions
epiSurv does not have FHIR interfaces, they have done some HTTPS for lab results - the FHIR we have experience with is the Eclair FHIR - that’s what shows the results via the my covid record - funny thing though - notice it ONLY shows the results as FHIR is a “result” standard - not a “test” standard - we are going to have to do something different to show the test BEFORE it has a result - would your project need to do something different? Funny thing - I don’t work for ESR just worked with them during this as I made those eReferrals aka eNotifications using the eReferral system when this all hit the fan, so the GPs did not have to fax paper ( I jest not) and one of my motivations was to try and get all notifiable diseases transmitted in a better way than we do currently - so I think the ESR team will be interested to hear and work with you on this