Hello and welcome to this tutorial on the CalREDIE electronic lab reporting system, and how to get data sent through to it. We have had a number of people come to us looking for advice on how to make this connection, so we thought we would create a quick video giving you an introduction to what is required.

CalREDIE has a pretty good website. There are details about how to enroll to get the connection. Basically, you enroll with them, they send you information on how to make the connection, including some message structure and validation details, and then you have to map your data into their HL7 message and send that through. It is a SOAP web service, so you send that through to them for processing.

We are just going to dummy it up and give you an introduction on how to do that. I have a samples directory for CalREDIE, and inside here I have a very basic indication of the data that your system produces. It is obviously not real, and it is very limited. Yours will have a lot more information. You might have it in another format as well. It could already be a type of HL7, it could be XML, it could be JSON. I am sticking to a basic CSV, but the idea is the same for each of those.

We have also got a sample CalREDIE message, and I am just going to open that up inside HL7 Soup. This is one I took from their documentation. It is not real data; it is just enough to muck around with. As you can see, there is a lot of complexity in the HL7 messages they have. There is a lot of data that actually goes through in each of them. I am not going to show you how to map every field, but I will give you an indication of how to map some of them through.

We will start by loading up Integration Host. I have already installed Integration Host, and I have the development license in place, so I can now create a new workflow. First we are going to convert our CSV file to HL7. We are going to scan for that file, so I am going to add a Directory Scanner. I will search for anything that turns up in that CalREDIE directory, and we will be looking for CSV files.

I will change the message type to CSV, and then we put in a sample of that data. This one happens to be a comma-separated file. For CSV, it is easier to put in some headers to fill in the places. If you had XML or JSON, you would paste the full message that you have into this message template. Finally, after it is processed, we are just going to delete that file.

As the second step, we are going to add a File Writer. We are going to write it back into the CalREDIE folder as an HL7 file. We will change it to one record per file, and we will move the source file to another directory after we have processed it. We will stick with CalREDIE, but call the processed folder "processed", and put our HL7 output there.

Now we want to grab the CalREDIE HL7 message and place it in as the message template, because this is effectively the message we want to write into that directory. Many of these fields are going to stay the same. Many of them are literal values. You can go into your sample value and put in whatever values suit. A literal field can go into this position. You can put all the literal values that do not change per message into the template.

Now we have to map the incoming values into this message. To do that, I will go into the transformers. You can see it has worked out from the headers that I gave it all the fields coming in. This is a tree representing the outbound message, so now I can just map the bits together. I will map the patient ID coming in to the patient ID in the HL7. I can drag that across and it creates a binding between the two.

I can do the same with the patient's name. Bring the first name across to the given name, the last name across to the family name, and I will also map the date of birth across. You are going to want to do all sorts of formatting to this as well. I have other videos on doing that. Have a look at the getting started tutorials at the top; they give you a good introduction to getting the formatting right for an HL7 message. I am just going to stick with the basics here, save and close this workflow, and give it a try.

I go back to my sample directory, take that temp file, copy it back up, and paste it into the incoming folder. Notice it has now created the processed directory I specified, and it has created twelve messages with unique file names, each representing one of the twelve items inside that CSV file.

If I take those and drag them over into HL7 Soup, we can merge those files in and see all the messages. There is a validation error because I did not convert the date. They were in a different date format. Again, look at the other videos for the details on how to do that. But as a general rule, you can see what we have done: we have created an HL7 file where our literal values are in each record, and the values from our system have been mapped into those fields.

Now we are going to create another step to this process. We are going to read those values in and send them through to CalREDIE. To do that, I am going to create a new workflow. Again, I am going to use a Directory Scanner. I want to pick up the processed CalREDIE directory, and I am going to pick up all the HL7 files from there.

I want to add in a message template again. I will use one of the sample HL7 messages. It is just a sample of what is coming in, and it does not matter too much at that point. Once it has processed the file, we will set it to delete after processing.

The next step is to send it through to the web server, so I click on a Web Service Sender. We just need to get the location of it. Here is their WSDL address. I have that ready for me to get to, so I am going to paste it in here and try to connect.

This is going to fail, and the reason it is going to fail is because we do not have the certificate installed. When you sign up, they will give you a security certificate. Here is mine, so I need to install that onto my computer. I double-click it, choose to put it into my local machine, and the path is good. I do need to know a password for it, so I put that in. Then I choose where to put it. I browse to my Personal certificate store, click OK, and finish. It has now been imported into my system.

There is one more detail I need to do. I need to get the certificate's thumbprint. If I type in MMC or manage computer certificates, then go to Personal Certificates and open my certificate, I can go to Details and get the thumbprint of that certificate.

I can now take that thumbprint back to Integration Host and go to Show More Connection Settings. For the client certificate, I paste the thumbprint in here. If you happen to have a lot of spaces in yours, get rid of the spaces as you paste it in.

Now I can hit Connect. It has gone to CalREDIE and successfully connected to that data, and it has brought back the list of operations that are available to me. There is a connectivity test and there is a submit message, so I am going to choose Submit Message.

I scroll down and see that it has pre-populated all the fields that need filling out for me. You do need to pass in a user ID, a password, the data owner ID, the program ID, the environment, and the action. If you are sending on behalf of someone, you can use their data owner ID, but in this case I am sending on behalf of myself, so it is the same as my user ID. The program ID identifies which program you are sending to. In the tutorial example, CalREDIE ELR is one, CAIR is two, and CCR is three. The environment is production or test, P for production and T for test. The action I am going to do is send, and you could also put in query if that was appropriate.

Finally, for the message content, we have to put that HL7 message into here. To do that, I am going to bind in the value that this Directory Scanner picks up. All I have to do is right-click in the right place, choose Insert Activity Message, and choose the Directory Scanner activity. Now that inbound message is going to be resent as the content.

I could put that inside CDATA to make sure it is not reading across any fields that are not allowed inside XML. But what I can also do is right-click on it, choose Encoding, and set it to XML encode. It changes the color to green. Now any bit of text in there that would make this XML message invalid, such as an ampersand in the wrong place, will be escaped. An ampersand becomes &, keeping the message valid.

That is all that needs to be done. If I hit Save and Close, this starts processing. Back in Integration Host, you can see it has already processed twelve messages. I could have made the name a bit better, so I will prepend that just to make it easier to identify the difference between the two workflows.

Here we can see the logs of what actually happened. If I click on that, it has taken those messages, picked up the HL7, and the second step has sent it through. Here is the response we got back. Of course, it is giving us an invalid username and password, but we have successfully sent the message. If we put in the right username and password and created a valid HL7 message, then that would work once the username and password issue was sorted.

There is probably one other thing you really have to keep in mind: CalREDIE has a lot of fields inside the HL7 message that are required to be provided. You have to make sure that the message this workflow sends out has a decent message structure.

What you can do is take one of your messages and use the validator tool on their website. Fill out your details, paste in your message, and hit Validate. Once that comes back, download the results and open the report. The validation tool will tell you what fields were not found. In this example, there were a few required fields I did not have, and a few missing valid characters for them. They give you a pretty detailed report.

Each of those issues has to be corrected inside the workflow. You would provide either a mapping with a transformer or a literal value in the right location.

I realize there is a lot to take in there. You are welcome to contact HL7 Soup support if you need help connecting to CalREDIE, and we can help you get your integration working. Do not forget to take a look at some of our other videos that show you how to convert from different message formats into HL7. You will need to get the data types right and escape characters correctly. If this video has helped you, please give us a like. It really does help us, and consider subscribing to our channel. Thank you.