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12.1 INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW

The Patient Care [ While not an ideal term, the word "patient" is used here to represent the entire spectrum of individuals who receive health care in a variety of settings including, but not limited to, acute care, clinic care, long term care, residential care, home health care, office practices, school-based care and community settings.] Technical Committee has designed the following messages to support the communication of problem-oriented records, including clinical problems, goals, and pathway information between computer systems. The purpose of this chapter is to describe health care messages that need to be communicated between clinical applications for a given individual. These message transactions can be sent in either batch or on-line mode. As described in Chapter 2, multiple communication transactions may be grouped and sent between applications using a file transfer media or direct networked connection.

This chapter defines the transactions that occur at the seventh OSI level, that is, abstract messages. The examples of messages included in this chapter were constructed using the HL7 Encoding Rules.

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