Use of Clinical Laboratory Results for Military Medical Surveillance: The Health Level 7 Experience

Medical surveillance in the military can be improved through the use of clinical laboratory results collected within the Military Health System. This presentation describes an effort to establish Electronic Laboratory Reporting in the military using existing Health Level 7 (HL7) messages. HL7 data is being evaluated for data integrity, completeness, reliability and validity. In addition, initial efforts to evaluate, standardize, and use this data to support investigations of interest over the past year are presented.

Objective

This presentation describes the HL7 clinical lab results dataset and how it can and has been used for medical surveillance in the military.