America's Blood Centers Newsroom

Plan Approved to Extend Hospital HL7 Standard into Blood Banking

September 16, 2011

In a development that could have profound implications for the blood community in coming years, Health Level Seven® (HL7) International on Thursday gave final approval to a plan to extend the HL7 standard used by many hospitals into the blood center environment.

The HL7 Orders and Observations Work Group balloted and passed a preliminary version of the HL7 Version 2.6 Implementation Guide: Blood Bank Donation Services, Release 1, after an initial round of balloting in May.

Earlier this month, a slightly revised version of the Implementation Guide was approved 27‐0 in a second ballot. Formal approval of the document came during HL7’s 25th Annual Plenary and Working Group Meeting this week (Sept. 11‐16, 2011) in San Diego, Calif.

 
After the necessary paperwork is filed, the Implementation Guide will be published and made available to HL7 members.   Once published, the guide can be accessed under the “Version 2.x Messaging Standard – Version 2.x Informative Documents” section of the HL7 Standards page on the HL7.org website. 

The Implementation Guide for the blood banking specification, informally called Blood Banking HL7 (BBHL7), was developed by a multidisciplinary project team over two years. “This significant achievement is the result of tireless work by a talented group of people,” said Jonathan Harber, CIO and vice president of Information Technology for Blood Systems, who
serves as chairman of the project team, called the HL7 Special Interest Group (SIG).

 
“We believe that standardization will bring a return on investment for both blood centers and the software firms that market to them,” Mr. Harber said. “Without standardization, there would be no debit cards or online payments. Similarly, BBHL7 will make possible a host of new efficiencies and innovations.”

The SIG is composed of standards experts, blood center IT and operations personnel, and representatives of blood establishment computer software (BECS) vendors. The team receives staff and marketing support from America’s Blood Centers and has been co‐funded by the Foundation for America’s Blood Centers and Blood Systems.

The HL7 standard is the most common data exchange standard used by hospitals and clinical laboratories. BBHL7 includes trigger events, message definitions, and data structures for the blood banking donor experience (donor registration, donor identification, mini‐physical, medical history questionnaire, eligibility, phlebotomy, and product transport).  

BBHL7will enable speedy and accurate data exchanges between blood center devices and systems, and eventually between blood centers and transfusion centers, thereby reducing transfusion errors and improving patient safety. 

Extending the HL7 standard also may reduce the regulatory costs that are incurred when blood center vendors want to bring new or upgraded products to market. 

Some terms and definitions come directly from the HL7 standard used by hospitals and labs, while others came from the forerunner of the current project team. That effort began in 2000 and culminated with new hospital blood bank‐related messages, segments, and trigger events, which were accepted in version 2.5 of the HL7 Standard. 

The first project team focused on hospital‐ side blood banking needs, but no one had ever attempted to extend the standard into the donor side. Then, in 2008, America’s Blood Centers held a BECS Conference in Silver Spring, Md. One of the suggestions that came out of the conference was to establish a common interface standard for blood center software.  That led to the formation of the current HL7 SIG.

“This is a natural outgrowth of a standard that has been used in healthcare settings for three decades,” said Patti Larson, product manager at Haemonetics Software Solutions and a member of both the original project team and the current project team. Ms. Larson formerly served as director of Centralized Transfusion Services Systems at the Institute for Transfusion Medicine in Pittsburgh, Pa. 

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