Patient creation with SIU messages
Drive care flows from hospital appointment messages, so scheduling an appointment starts a care flow and canceling it stops one.
SIU (Scheduling Information Unsolicited) messages are Health Level Seven (HL7) messages that carry appointment information between clinical and administrative systems. The hospital scheduling system generates them, and Awell receives them.
It's the most automated way to connect a hospital: care flows follow appointments, and clinicians don't manage them by hand.
Appointment messages start, modify and cancel the care flow
| Message | Event | What Awell does |
|---|---|---|
| SIU S12 | Appointment created | Starts a care flow |
| SIU S14 | Appointment modified | Modifies the care flow |
| SIU S15 | Appointment canceled | Cancels the care flow |
The patient's care flow therefore tracks the appointment's real state, including cancellations.
How the messages reach Awell
SIU messages are processed by Mirth, which can run on the hospital side or the Awell side. See How Awell connects to other systems.
The hospital makes a location available for Awell to collect the messages from. Awell also needs a virtual private network (VPN) to query the hospital for patient demographics, since an SIU message carries appointment and identifier information rather than a full patient record.
What to agree before building
This integration spans two organizations, so the decisions below need agreement on both sides:
- Which appointment types should start a care flow. Not every booking should.
- Which care flow each appointment type maps to.
- What happens on S14 and S15, particularly whether a cancellation stops the flow or just a track.
- The identifier used to match the patient. See Patient identifiers.
Agree these in a swimlane diagram before writing any Mirth channels.
Next steps
Next: Patient Demographics Query for pulling the patient record itself.
Patient identifiers
How Awell uses FHIR-style system and value pairs so one patient can carry several identifiers from several systems without losing which is which.
Patient Demographics Query (PDQ)
The PDQ integration reference: how Awell searches a Patient Demographics Supplier by identifier, what the request and response look like, and how Awell Care reacts.