Electronic laboratory reporting
Utah—Electronic laboratory reporting (ELR) meaningful use (MU) stage 3 information for providers
The Utah Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) supports submission of electronic laboratory reporting (ELR) for meaningful use (MU) from eligible hospitals and critical access hospitals.
Note: DHHS can work with any provider who wants to put ELR into practice to help automate/facilitate the reporting of reportable infectious diseases through ELR.
Complete the DHHS MU registration form to register intent for ELR MU stage 3. Eligible hospitals and critical access hospitals will need to submit the following information when they register:
- Name, address, and phone number of the eligible hospital or critical access hospital.
- The eligible hospital/critical access hospital's MU contact person and contact information (name, phone number and email address). This will be the person that the ELR MU coordinator with DHHS will communicate with regarding ELR MU.
- Electronic health record (EHR) software package and version. EHR technologies that meet the certification requirements for the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs are listed on the ONC website. Note: MU certification does not imply that the product meets all MU requirements. If your software is not listed, it may not qualify for MU. Contact the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) for additional questions about software approved by the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy (ASTP).
ELR meaningful use stage 3 objective
Eligible hospitals and critical access hospitals work to establish an ongoing submission of production-level ELR data in a validated HL7 ORU-R01 2.5.1 message to DHHS. The requirement for this objective under MU stage 3 is identical to MU stage 2. But for any eligible hospital or critical access hospital that was unable to accomplish a status of “Active Engagement—Production” under MU stage 2, this gives the eligible hospital or critical access hospital a chance to move forward with establishing a production-level ELR interface with DHHS under MU stage 3.
Validated messages should comply with the standards found in the HL7 version 2.5.1 implementation guide: electronic laboratory reporting to public health (US Realm) release 1, HL7 informative document (February 2010). NOTE: an HL7 account is required to access/download this document.
ELR MU stage 3:
Complete the DHHS MU registration form to register intent for ELR MU stage 3 with DHHS. Currently, all facilities that register for ELR MU stage 3 will immediately be expected to begin “active engagement.” The basic steps of active engagement are:
- Set up a transmission interface. Work with the DHHS ELR MU program to set up a transmission interface for submitting ongoing ELR data to DHHS. Options include: SFTP, APHL Informatics Messaging Service (AIMS) Platform Route-not-Read, and Utah Health Information Network (UHIN) Clinical Health Information Exchange (cHIE).
- Generate and send a compliant ELR HL7 v2.5.1 ORU-R01 message to DHHS, either from your EHR system via your transmission interface, or manually, using the DHHS ELR online message submission form. Use the DHHS ELR implementation guide [v1.9]. This guide will help define the HL7 elements that DHHS needs for ELR MU stage 3 compliance.
- Initiate an ongoing live data feed from your EHR system. This feed will be sent to the DHHS testing system until the feed is ready for production.
- Send all vocabulary value sets that are in use and sent in your ongoing feed.
- Fix all structural and vocabulary issues with the message as per requests from the DHHS ELR onboarding team.
- Review the Reportable events and vocabulary (Electronic) [v1.1] spreadsheet to identify all laboratory events that are reportable in Utah. If you are unable to filter laboratory events as described in this document, you may send all tests/results to DHHS and DHHS can filter out and discard/destroy all non-reportable events.
All facilities are expected to cc the ELR coordinator on all written correspondence during this onboarding process. All facilities must respond to requests and questions from DHHS within 30 days throughout the onboarding process.
The process of onboarding a laboratory to production ELR can take several months to complete. It is expected that the laboratory will continue to maintain a manual reporting feed throughout the onboarding process and beyond, until DHHS can do a quality assessment check to validate that the ELR matches the manual reporting feed.
The hospital lab will be notified by DHHS when they can turn off their manual reporting feed.
DHHS ELR contact
- Utah DHHS Informatics Program
- Email: [email protected]