Description of the MHS Health Level 7 Pharmacy Outpatient Data for Public Health Surveillance

The EpiData Center Department EDC at the Navy and Marine Corps Public Health Center evaluated the Health Level 7 HL7 data source for its usefulness in health surveillance activities. This technical document provides a history of the HL7 pharmacy outpatient database and its contents, explains the creation of prescription records, describes the pathway of data from healthcare provider to the EDC, provides a detailed descriptions of all variables within the database, and assesses the databases strengths and limitations. Given an understanding of the strengths and limitations of the data, HL7 pharmacy outpatient data have proven to be a valuable source of health information for surveillance purposes. The data can be used for case identification when disease-specific treatment is available, or used to assess clinical practice guideline adherence for known cases. Furthermore, data are received in a timely fashion, allowing for near-real-time surveillance of diseases.